If you watch All is Lost pay very close attention to its opening lines, because it's all you're going to get of backstory. In fact it's practically all you're going to get of dialogue - except for a cry or two for help and one well earned expletive. Robert Redford's mini monologue hints at a turbulent past, a family left broken or, perhaps, something else entirely. Because that's all it is. A hint. A suggestion. The film says make of it what you will, because it's not going to mention it again, nor is it going to give you anything else to guide you.
The story is simple: Redford, the film's one and only cast member, and credited simply as Our Man, wakes to water filling his cabin. His boat has been struck by a wayward shipping container, and it's just the start of his troubles. Over eight days he'll use body (albeit a slow and aged one) and soul to hold his boat together; but (non-spoiler alert!) as the title suggests, it's unlikely to end well.
All is Lost is a film paired down to its bare elements. For some that makes it the purest kind of cinema. It sticks so rigidly to the central tenant of screenwriting - show don't tell - that it almost feels like its being wilful about it. To a degree it can't help it: Redford is on his own, he has no one to talk to, so how could the film do much of any 'telling'? But that doesn't mean we should be left quite so lacking in things with which to connect. Halfway through the film Redford takes a sextant (a ye olde' form of plotting your ship's course) out of a box and briefly looks at a letter attached to it. The letter's open. There's nothing written on the front. For a moment it looks like it might be a window into his past. The sextant must be a gift from a loved one! Maybe a dead son? He's escaped to sea to forget that tragedy! Except no. What's more likely is that it's from the makers of the sextant and it simply says 'Thank you for buying from Sextant Suppliers - purveyors of top quality sextants!' For those that were frustrated by Alfonso Cuaron's at times heavy handed use of backstory in Gravity, here director J.C. Chandor offers a counterpoint. This is what Gravity would have been like without it, and it's not an entirely welcome change.
In another actor's hands the above might not have been so frustrating. You don't need backstory to tell a story, but you do need an actor with whom you can empathise, and onto whom you can project a past, whether bleak or otherwise. Redford's screen persona tends to be charming and suave, but with a hint of smugness to it. Here that sits ill, and in a film with just one actor, that's highly problematic.
Chandor's film is often compelling, and at times beautiful, but it's ultimately to cold and distant to care about.
Overall: 7/10
Since I've been away for a spell I've also set down a few quick lines on some of the other recent releases:
American Hustle - Great cast, great director, mostly okay film. In the early noughties there was a glut of conman films with tricksy intricate plots and not a single character you could trust. American Hustle sits neatly amongst these. The only thing that marks it out as different is its warped sense of humour (which is most notable in Bradley Cooper's pent up aggression and Jennifer Lawrence's beautifully unhinged singing). The gang orchestrating the (accidentally) long con on a group of gangsters and senators are all amusingly colourful, but continually having to guess at their true motives - particularly those of Amy Adams - becomes exhausting, and then annoying. Perhaps the main problem is that it's an ensemble film that keeps trying to pick a lead, but doesn't know how to settle on one. 6.5/10
Frozen - The youngling I took along to Frozen stated that it was his favourite film ever. Since said youngling has been on steady diet of Pixar and Miyazaki, that's high praise. Frozen is dryly funny, with some fantastic songs (and I don't tend to go in for this whole musical malarky), but it often looks oddly empty. It's been animated immaculately, but there's an awful lot of dead space on the screen, as if the filmmakers want to make it as easy possible for Disney to turn it into a hit stage show on Broadway. How else to explain the large empty sets the characters inhabit? Yes, the characters live in vast castles that are supposed to highlight their loneliness and isolation, and yes, the environment just beyond them is a vast snowy tundra, and very pretty for it - but it still looks more like a broadway set than it does their home. 7/10
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