All Is Lost

The Sundance Kid and the Sea

Grade: A –

Director: J.C. Chandor

Starring: Robert Redford

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 46 min.

Set amid the oceanic expanse, All is Lost is anything but a survival movie, for many reasons. Nevertheless, mortality is very much at the film’s heart, which beats to the rhythms of despair and redemption. This one-man show is both affirming and bracing, a reminder that even the best of the human condition is fragile and fleeting. It’s revealing that the film’s lone character, portrayed with extraordinary minimalism by Robert Redford, is credited as “Our Man.” He embodies our collective best traits: brave, intelligent, independent and resolute. But ultimately, he’s just a man.

In the opening scene, he awakes in the middle of the Indian Ocean to see that water is flooding into his sailboat, “The Virginia Jean,” its hull punctured by a stray metal shipping container full of tennis shoes. The striking thing about Our Man is that he doesn’t believe that all is lost. Instead, he a calm, sober seafarer, inadept with a sextant but adaptable to employing it and other survival solutions, from painstakingly spreading homemade epoxy to seal the boat’s breach to navigating into shipping lanes to attract the help of passing ships to converting a gas can into a condensation collector for drinking water. Along the way, he must constantly decide when and when not to abandon various vessels, along with other difficult choices driven more by discernment than emotion.

Filmed in the same studio water tank where the movie Titanic was once made, All Is Lost is narratively a cross between Cast Away and the visceral Open Water. But, for all the film’s storyline sparseness, it is a thematic Rorschach Test. At the forefront is a parable on mortality, how all of one’s knowledge, experience and preparation are no match for life’s storms and death’s inevitability. And what better vehicle to use than the 77-year-old Redford, long a paean to eternal cinematic youth, deconstructed here from a confident, independent soul to one enveloped by desperate madness.

There’s spiritual and biblical connotations at play: the aquatic milieu suggests Jonah, but Our Man’s plight is more evocative of Job. Squint and you’ll also see a subtle commentary on the marginalization of individuals in our sea of capitalism. Besides those destructive sneakers, there’s the striking image of Our Man juxtaposed against a passing Maersk freighter filled with hundreds of the same containers that disabled his boat eight days earlier, his cries for help too miniscule to divert the commercial colossus.

This sophomore feature by director J.C. Chandor explores with a different sort of survival than his promising debut, Margin Call, which dealt with the Wall Street meltdown. Nevertheless, a similar feeling of hopelessness is at play. All Is Lost isn’t an exclamation of surrender; it’s a recognition of life’s reality.

Buck

Buck...Mr. Brannaman if you're nasty

Grade: B +

Director: Cindy Meehl

Starring: Dan “Buck” Brannaman and Robert Redford

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hr. 28 min.

Robert Redford thought someone was pulling his leg the first time he met horse trainer Dan “Buck” Brannaman. Interviewing to serve as a consult for Redford’s 1998 film adaptation of The Horse Whisperer, Buck strolled into the filmmaker’s Hollywood office clad as an apparent cowboy caricature, complete with buckskin chaps and a rancher’s hat.

It’s an initial reaction shared by viewers of Buck, a debut documentary by director Cindy Meehl about the renowned real-life “horse whisperer.” Opening scenes of Buck and his horse galloping and cantering in slow-motion through sunlit pastures, while the horseman muses via voice-over how one’s horse “is a mirror to your soul.” Viewers may recoil slightly from the too-good-to-be-true conceit, questioning whether they’ve wandered into an infomercial hawking Buck’s instructional videos.

The confusion has some merit. Beyond his acumen in the philosophy of “natural horsemanship,” Buck is showman, beginning at age 6 when he and his older brother Bill (stage name “Smokie”) were raised by their domineering father as famous, record-holding trick ropers. However, any misgivings evaporate the first time you witness one of Buck’s horse clinics, when he take the reigns of an unbroken steed trying to buck free from its owner and, within minutes, casually guides the horse around the corral like an pied piper for equines.

Like Redford, it’s only once the audience gets to know the soft-spoken, sometimes taciturn Buck and his life story that you appreciate the grace of the man. Deservedly the winner of audience awards at this year’s Sundance and Full Frame festivals, Buck is more than a mere hagiography.

Buck’s empathetic brand of horse training has its roots in the merciless physical and emotional abuse his alcoholic father heaped upon Buck and his brother as children, particularly after the early death of their caring mother. Buck’s welts eventually caught the attention of a school coach and local sheriff’s deputy, leading to placement in the large, nurturing home of foster parents Forrest and Betsy Shirley.

Buck is a portrait of contrasts, the archetypal American cowboy who also carries an iPod and admits to watching Oprah for tips on what women like (according to the episode Buck references, a man pushing a vacuum cleaner is an aphrodisiac). He’s the silhouette of masculinity cast against a rugged profession, but he is also a sensitive, scarred soul whose career path stems, in part, from a lifelong search for father figure.

Vintage footage of horses being “broken” through whipping and other violent means transition to images of Buck’s method of TLC, including little flags he purposefully flickers in front of them. In a similar vein, although Buck's troubled childhood lends necessary context to his life and technique, Meehl refrains from flogging the audience by turning his life into a sentimental recovery narrative. There is inherent loneliness and detachment in the fact that Buck’s vocation removes him from his family 40 weeks out of every year. But, his marriage remains resilient and one daughter joins him on the road during summers and is following in her father’s footsteps as a competitive roper.

There are gaps in Meehl’s rendering, most notably the fate of Smokie, who did not participate in the film for reasons the director curiously declined to clarify during a Full Frame post-screening Q–&–A session. Morover, a latent push to deify Buck also persists, making a sequence involving a brain-damaged-from-birth stallion all the more important. Meehl’s camera catches the horse suddenly and viciously attacking its handlers during a clinic, violence that merely hints at the mistreatment it has surely endured. Buck’s characteristically calm countenance cracks with digust and dejection as he chastises the horse’s owner for her misguided rearing. ”The horse didn’t fail us. We failed him,” he laments.

It’s not exactly throwing the money changers out of the temple, but the moment does show what makes Buck tick…and ticked off. To paraphrase its star, Buck is not a movie about “horse problems.” It’s a movie about “people problems.”

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com - http://goo.gl/8KfEi

The Conspirator

I thought the statute of limitations had
run on my "Santa Barbara" days

Grade: C +

Director: Robert Redford

Starring: James McAvoy, Robin Wright, Evan Rachel Wood, Alexis Bledel, Justin Long, Tom Wilkinson, Danny Huston, and Kevin Kline

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 3 min.

Not until about 20 minutes into The Conspirator do you realize why Robert Redford, a film legend and activist whose recent interests have skewed more political than cinematic, would direct a historical drama about the trial of one of the conspirators behind Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.

The opening act is a well-crafted, authentic recounting of the conspiracy to simultaneously murder Secretary of State William Seward and Vice President Andrew Johnson, culminating with John Wilkes Booth gunning down Lincoln inside Ford’s Theatre. Redford’s impressive attention to detail, here and throughout the film, includes the wooden brace Booth used to jam the door leading to Lincoln’s theater box, the diagonal placement of Lincoln on the bed inside William Peterson’s boarding house because the president was too tall to lie straight, and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Kevin Kline) ordering a hysterical Mary Lincoln out of the room housing her dying husband.

As Booth and his cohorts are rounded up, the government eventually beats a path to a D.C. boarding house run by Mary Surratt (Robin Wright) where the assassination plot was allegedly hatched. Under orders from Seward, Surratt is tried before a military tribunal where she is not allowed to testify in her own defense, and neither she nor her attorney, Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy), are privy to the prosecution’s evidence prior to trial.

It’s only when the storyline shifts focuses onto this Gitmo-style simulacrum, with Seward playing the part of a 19^th century mash-up of Cheney and Rumsfeld, that Redford’s motives become far clearer than those of his characters. Aiken, a former Union soldier, is cast as a war hero and idealist, but the only adversity he suffers for his unpopular defense of Surratt is excommunication from his gentleman’s club and the occasional anxiety of his fiancée (Alexis Bledel).

Meanwhile, we are left puzzling over Mary’s Mary’s relationship with her son John (Johnny Simmons) and daughter Anna (Evan Rachel Wood), both of whom seem strangely reluctant to come to their mother’s aid. Further, why does every Southern character speak with such a clichéd drawl –Tom Wilkinson’s senator from Maryland sounds as if he was voice-coached by Foghorn Leghorn.

As some evidence of Mary’s culpability gradually emerges, writer James Solomon waffles between defending Mary’s innocence and indicting the legal apparatus erected to prosecute her, the latter a more bloodless endeavor. Make no mistake: there is unfairness here that deserves contempt regardless of Mary’s guilt, such as the external influence exerted to assure a death sentence in lieu of life imprisonment.

However, Redford’s rendering is so captivated by its historical heft that it forgets to engage its audience in the figures at the center of its diorama. The trial and hanging of Mary Surratt is an important, nearly forgotten episode of American jurisprudence. The Conspirator, on the other hand, is more likely to have you scouring Wikipedia than IMDb.com.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at Indyweek.com: http://goo.gl/yqIFK