There are few directors that cinephiles continue to hold out hope that they have another great movie in them like Wim Wenders. Aside from documentaries like “The Salt Of The Earth” and “Pina,” it feels like an entire generation has passed since the German auteur, despite working a prolific clip, has delivered a truly great feature film. While major actors continue to line up and work for the filmmaker, recent efforts like “Every Thing Will Be Fine” and “The Beautiful Days Of Aranjuez” have failed to connect critically, and certainly haven’t commercially. Depending on who you ask, Wenders last significant narrative effort was 2004’s “Land Of Plenty.” Others would go further back than that. Certainly no one will argue that “Submergence” is a return to form, with this soggy, heavy-handed, and ultimately empty drama once again seeing the man who gave us work like “Wings Of Desire,” “Paris, Texas” and “Kings Of The Road” missing his magic touch.
Based on the book by J.M. Ledgard, I can only imagine this worked better as a novel, because the screenplay by Erin Dignam (who also penned Sean Penn’s thrashed “The Last Face”) is certainly ridiculous, except when it’s tedious. Utilizing a clunky flashback structure, the thrust of the story is essentially as follows: bio-mathematician Danielle (Alicia Vikander) and secret spy James (James McAvoy) meet cute while holidaying at a fancy French resort, that doesn’t seem to have any guests. Both quickly fall into the bone zone, and their connection is so passionate, that despite only spending a few days together, and even though both have big career-changing gigs ahead of them in opposite parts of the world, they fall hopelessly in love and promise to stay connected.
Danielle heads to the literal bottom of the ocean, to continue her groundbreaking research, yet we’re supposed to believe the focused workaholic is so smitten with James, she’s prone to saying things like, “I’ve realized I’ve never been lonely before.” Rather than spending her time at the microscope, Danielle wistfully looks at her smartphone, staring at the messages she’s sent to her beloved that have gone unanswered. James, however, has a good reason for being MIA. Sent to Somalia to track down dangerous terrorists, he winds up being captured, and tossed into a dank, dark cell. In case the lines weren’t drawn clear enough — both Danielle and James are submerged (!!!) figuratively by their emotions, and literally by their environment.
Spreading out across nearly two, very long hours, the story bounces back and forth between Danielle and James, but it’s difficult to ignore the wild imbalance to their respective situations. Danielle is mostly just kind of sad, and is left pining for a man that she hardly knows, buying his cover story that he’s a water engineer, and wondering why he’s incommunicado. As for James, he doesn’t have much time to think about his brief fling in the rustic France countryside, with his life in danger almost every minute of the day. Somewhere in the middle of this dull and preposterous tale, Wenders tries to find parallels in the underdeveloped thematic threads about environmentalism, the future of the planet, and fundamentalist terrorism, before attempting to tie them together into a soggy love story that never for one moment feels authentic.
Vikander and McAvoy do what they can with the material, and do spark some energy in their scenes together, but everything is so underwritten that even their commitment isn’t enough to elevate it off the page. Wenders work behind the camera is hardly worthy of remark, and the filmmaker leans heavily on the loud, overwrought score by Fernando Velazquez (“Crimson Peak,” “A Monster Calls”) to attempt to do the dramatic heavy lifting. Earnestly aiming to land with the weight of an Important Film married with Big Ideas, the more “Submergence” tries and strains to find connections to contemporary issues, the more those beats ring hollow. “Submergence” not only leaves the talent involved underwater, but the audience also longs for anything of significance to cling to. [D]
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