The Heaviness Between Oceans

By Katherine Monk

As far as failures go, it’s a noble one. Derek Cianfrance wanted to make a meaningful weepie with his adaptation of M.L. Stedman’s period novel about a lighthouse keeper and a missing baby, but like the characters themselves, it’s a case of good intentions gone terribly wrong.

That doesn’t mean The Light Between Oceans is a terrible movie. It’s not. After all, it stars two of the most hypnotic screen presences working in the cinema today: Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander. Moreover, the two reportedly fell in love on the Tasmanian set, lending all the lovey stuff an added dimension of perceived authenticity.

It’s the expectations that this movie comes with that torture its success.

A full-on period romance set just after the final days of The First World War, The Light Between Oceans introduces us to Tom Sherbourne (Fassbender), a veteran from the trenches who agrees to take a six-month stint as a lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock – a jagged outcropping of an island where the Great Southern Ocean and the Indian Ocean meet off Australia’s south coast.

Tom is a quiet man who bears the scars of war on the inside, so even when he learns the previous keeper went a little stir-crazy, he’s not intimidated by the thought of loneliness. In fact, after witnessing the horrors of men, he says he’s happy for the time alone. And so we watch Tom keep the light through storms and squalls as Cianfrance tries to give us a sense of time and place.

He wants us to feel Tom’s alienation and his inner suffering through shots of Tom fixing things, writing in the lighthouse logbook, and every so often, weeping quietly over an anvil. Getting to know people through a contrived montage always feels a little cheap, but Cianfrance had so much emotional content on his plate he had no choice.

He has to gulp a few mouthfuls without really chewing. Tom is scarred and tough, but Isabel (Vikander) is soft and fresh. A local gal who’s always been fascinated by the lighthouse, Isabel finds Tom intriguing. She flirts and smiles, rekindling Tom’s life force with each bat of her long eyelashes.

The two marry and head off to the rock with plans of raising a family, but things don’t go as planned. Isabel miscarries then miscarries again. Broken and depressed, Isabel feels she’s failed as a woman and becomes despondent until fate delivers an apparent miracle: A dingy washes ashore carrying a dead man and a baby. The baby is alive, and Isabel believes she is destined to be its mother.

Tom must decide whether to report the discovery in the logbook, or not. There’s an ocean of an argument on either side, and Tom is adrift between the two. We should be there with him, standing on the rocky shore in cold water trying to figure out the dimensions of right and wrong.

But we aren’t. As much as Cianfrance wants to enlist our empathy by showing us Isabel’s heartbreaking miscarriages, we’re still highly aware of the consequences of nabbing a baby and burying a body.

The movie falls off the cliff of melodrama by the midway point, and unless you decide to walk out, you’re going to follow this scenic heap of sunsets and moody ocean shots as it wails on its laborious descent.

By the time we hit peak velocity in the last act, we’ve hurtled through several frames of loss, to the point where the whole movie starts to warp into something grotesque: mourning porn.

Because Vikander and Fassbender are clearly on a page all their own, falling in love and exchanging giddy glances, The Light Between Oceans never feels insincere, it just feels heavy and joyless.

The redemptive power of love is written into the script, but it gets tangled in too many scenes that track too much time. Cianfrance has no sense of dramatic phrasing. Scenes bleed into scenes without emphasis or punctuation, and when there’s so much emotional content swirling around, you can’t keep people waiting for the cathartic moment. It’s too exhausting; people check out.

Chances are, you may stick around for the ending, but by the time the end-credits roll on The Light Between Oceans, you may have already flicked the switch.

@katherinemonk

THE EX-PRESS, September 2, 2016

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