LIMBO (1999)
"It sure isn't heaven, and it's too cold to be hell."
3 out of ****
Starring David Strathairn, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Vanessa Martinez, Casey Siemazko, Kris Kristofferson; Written & Directed by John Sayles; Cinematography by Haskell Wexler
When John Sayles's career is over, his oeuvre will almost certainly stand as the most complex, committed, complete attempt by an American director to portray America in all its variety--not as a mythic land of freedom and opportunity, but as a place populated largely by ordinary people struggling to find the right person, to pay the bills, to balance morality and necessity, to cope with the curveballs life keeps delivering. Although not all his work is set in the U.S., Sayles is a staunchly American director, and while other directors tend to focus on specific elements in American society--Scorcese on the world of the mob, Spike Lee on black America, Woody Allen on Manhattan intellectuals--Sayles ranges from the Mexican border to New Jersey turnpikes to the coast of Alaska, always taking the time to contemplate the small details that comprise the substance of our lives.
His films are therefore a remarkable cross-section of the melting pot--a teenage girl graduating from high school, striking miners in West Virginia, the middle-aged wife of an academic discovering she is a lesbian, Mexican immigrants building new lives in a small Texas border town, and more, and more. LIMBO brings us to Port Henry, Alaska, painting a few more tiles in the American mosaic. The principal players, all superbly portrayed, are Joe (David Strathairn), a former fisherman and pulp mill worker who now works as a handyman; Donna (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), an aging harried lounge singer spending a year in Port Henry; and Donna's daughter Noelle (Vanessa Martinez), a precocious troubled teenager who resents her mother's string of deadbeat boyfriends and the subsequent lack of attention she receives.
Joe and Donna meet in an early scene, circumstances throw them together, and they embark on a cagy relationship. There is no love at first sight, no sense of fate bringing two people together--their relationship develops as relationships often do (though not in the movies), incrementally, hesitantly, uncertainly. Donna sings in a local bar, and Joe comes to hear her; one night between performances she and Joe have a straightforward conversation about who they are and where they come from, the type of conversation two mature people hurt by previous mistakes might have. It is a wonderful scene because it seems so uncontrived, so unassuming. Given the spate of recent American movies which are either Tarantino wannabes or slavish purveyors of Hollywood scriptwriting formulas, it seems extraordinary for two people in a film to have an ordinary exchange, charged with subtle emotion, fraught with human vulnerability.
The film offers many similar pleasures, such as the vivid secondary characters who bring the community to life: the two women who run a restaurant and employ both Joe and Noelle, the cannery worker whose boat they now own, the pilot whose brother died in a boating accident which Joe survived (Kris Kristofferson), Joe's brother Bobby who thinly disguises his failures with bluster and false cheer (Casey Siemazko). Because Sayles takes the time to linger on the socio-economic realities of the town and the specifics of place (the dialogue, for instance, is rich in atmospheric details like the mechanics of fishing and sailing), the characters' troubles and burdens take on poignancy and authenticity. It is easy to care, because if Joe and Donna and Noelle do not exist, people very like them do exist, in Port Henry or elsewhere. Despite some concessions to conventional plotting, the first hour of the movie is a slow, expansive, absorbing look at life in Port Henry, consciously presented as a non-simplistic response to the tour-package vision of Alaska as the last great American frontier, of nature as theme park.
LIMBO is remarkable because of the vivid clarity with which it sees its characters and gives them life, engaging our interest--there are two sequences which I found to be as tense as anything I have seen in a theatre in recent months, because I was so involved in the inner lives of these people. But LIMBO is also difficult and problematic, because it defies our narrative expectations. Midway through, the movie shifts gears to become a harrowing account of flight and survival in the wild, when Joe, Donna, and Noelle are stranded on an uninhabited island and forced to shelter in an old house, stripping them of their familiar routines, bringing them to an impasse where they must confront the stasis of their lives while waiting for help which may never come. Both halves of the movie are excellent on their own, but as a whole it seems disjointed--although this seems to be intentional.
And then it ends. Much has been made, already, about the provocative ending, which some reviewers seem to dislike because it violates an unwritten compact between auteur and audience; my problem is not with the technique as such, but that it makes much of the expository material in the slow first half seem, in retrospect, pointless. Still, I admire Sayles for being brave and foolhardy enough to stick to his guns. LIMBO is intent on showing us life as it is really lived, not as it is imagined in fiction. In fiction, we usually know how the story will end, or we at least know that it will end. In real life, you never know what will happen next, and that at least is also true of LIMBO.
Subjective Camera (subjective.freeservers.com) Movie Reviews by David Dalgleish (daviddalgleish@yahoo.com)
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