LIMBO (director/writer: John Sayles; cinematographer: Haskell Wexler; cast: Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (Donna De Angelo), David Strathairn (Joe Gastineau), Vanessa Martinez (Noelle de Angelo), Kris Kristofferson (Smilin' Jack), Casey Siemaszko (Bobby Gastineau), Kathryn Grody (Frankie), Rita Taggart (Lou), Leo Burmester (Harmon King), 1999)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
An emboldened narrative that weaves a tale around the embittered characters who live in Juneau, Alaska and struggle to make ends meet and keep their lives in check. They are in a precarious state of limbo between the natural beauty of the unspoiled last frontier of Alaska and the increasing commercialism, where developers want to turn the state into a theme park.
The three main characters are caught in their own psychological states of limbo, as fate has made life a tough go for them. They are a former fisherman and a former local high school basketball star around fifty years old, now working as a handyman, but who has the opportunity to fish again, "Jumping Joe" Gastineau (David Strathairn). Then there is Donna De Angelo (Elizabeth Mastrantonio), a forty-ish singer who reminds one a lot of Judy Collins, but who has not reached the pinnacle of her profession and is forced to eke out a living singing in lounges across 36 states and the territory of Puerto Rico. She travels to these jobs with her sensitive and resentful teen-age daughter who is gifted in writing stories and is an aspiring writer, Noelle (Vanessa Martinez). She is bewildered by her life and feels unwanted and unloved, not understanding how her mother keeps making wrong choices in the men she picks for boyfriends and why her real father, a musical composer, is unheard from. Her anger and disenchantment with life causes her to perform acts of self-mutilation.
They are really nice people, who each have a story to tell how they got trapped by their circumstances and how they reacted to it. Donna is the optimist, who even when she realizes that her career is going nowhere, still sometimes feels the songs she is singing "hook onto her" and sometimes that energy revitalizes her and gives her the warm smile she is capable of having, inspite of all the set backs in her life.
Joe is much more reticent and taken aback by the demise of his once promising life that went suddenly downhill through unforeseen circumstances. As a college basketball player he blew out a knee and lost his scholarship to a California university, returning to Juneau to work on his own charter boat, where he had a terrible accident when he and his two best friends got drunk, and while they were sleeping the boat capsized and he couldn't save his friends, plus he lost his boat and means of earning a living. This was too much for him to handle and he lost his will to go on living, withdrawing from people and his life as a fisherman.
For Noelle, her childhood is a bad memory, and to try to make sense out of it, she makes up stories, almost sharing the same down-trodden view of life that Joe has. And when she sees her mother leave her latest good-for-nothing boyfriend and fall for the quiet nice guy, who is an avid reader of books and also a rugged outdoorsman, it strikes her to be unfairly strange that she also had a crush on him.
What is noteworthy about the telling of the story, is how earnest and real their situation is, and how magnificently graceful the actors are, slowly revealing the sore points and tender sides of their troubled souls. This part of the film is played out against the background of an Alaska being ravaged for business interest, where the locals are being squeeezed out of their livlihoods. But this is a land of dreams, where hope is ever-present, even for those who spend their time in the colorful local saloon, whiling their time away with their own long stories.
The subplots that develop connect somehow with the main characters in an effortless way. The veteran fisherman and angry former boat owner working in a fishing processing plant that is closing down, Harmon King (Burmester), rails against what is happening to him and to Alaska, as he confronts the lesbian couple whom he lost his boat to in a business deal gone wrong. But the two can't even come close to understanding each other's side. This is the same boat that Joe is able to charter as he gets back to his love for fishing. It seems whatever you do in modern Alaska, you have to hurt someone or something, whether intentionally or not. Sayles plays upon the theme of the two Alaskas, one of the untapped future, which romantically holds visions of the beautiful wilderness, the other is the state where tourists come to hear stories about the past from the safety of a stagnant civilization.
The first part of the story draws the kindred spirits together, as Joe and Donna seem on their way to finding some happiness together, that their romanticism will prevail, and that they will not succumb to the pessimism that surrounds them. But Joe's much younger half-brother, Bobby (Siemaszko) shows up after a long time of them not seeing each other, and the two who never lived under the same roof and never had the same interests in life, but still maintained a distant but cordial relationship, talk about the father they had, who could not love them. Bobby innocently gets Joe to go out with him on his charter boat, concocting some story about meeting some businessmen and wanting to appear as the head of a business himself, so he needs Joe to act as a captain while he acts as an admiral. Joe uses this opportunity to lure Donna and her daughter out to sea, so he can get to know her better.
The second part of the story takes a troubling turn, as the ill-fated trio runs into a worst karma situation than theirs, that of Bobby. They end up stranded on a deserted island, with little hope of being rescued, as Bobby is shot by the drug dealer's enforcers, after a drug deal Bobby was involved in didn't work out right. They now must learn how to survive together, as their journey into the interior of the Alaskan wilderness takes away all the glamor of living away from civilization.
Here the three of them realize how unprepared they are for life in the wilderness, finding a broken-down abandoned shed to keep warm at night and signaling for help on an island where no one would logically come looking for them. The ending of the film is problematic and inconclusive, though it seems apparent that they are doomed. Smilin' Jack (Kris Kristofferson) finds them with his small seaplane but can't take them with him, as he tells Joe that he was hired by two people to find them. He leaves them there with a faint hope that he will act in a conscionable way. Smilin' Jack is the brother of one of those who was drowned in Joe's boat, something that this maverick drug smuggler has never forgiven Joe for. The film ends with a plane returning the next day, and the lingering question is, is it a rescue plane or one with the gunmen aboard? Their fate is tied to how the unscrupulous Smilin' Jack, ultimately, feels about them.
Many viewers will be disappointed that there is no payoff in the story.
The film was well served by a capable cast; and, even if, its story bit off a lot of ground to chew, a lot more than it was capable of fully digesting (too many topics from environmental issues to dysfunctional families), it was still good storytelling. But it did try to get too clever with the plot allowing every angle of the character's problems to fit too nicely together-- there was too much of a parallel symbolism of the castaways relating to their three lives that was too neat for its own good. For instance, Noelle is no longer isolated from her mother and is forced into accepting her mother's love, Joe has another chance of saving two people who couldn't before. But this is topped by thought provoking storytelling, one that was visually stunning as well as accomplished with mature dialogue.
The film didn't always work, as melodramatics seemed to take away from the tremendous drive the story had on its own merits as a straight romantic tale. But what kept it compelling was the human drama, that made me want to think that the trio had found something on their journey that they didn't realize that they had before. In any case, one can bank on a John Sayles film (Lone Star, Matewan, Passion Fish, Men with Guns) being interesting and provoking. Though the unresolved ending to the film might bother some viewers, that of being in a state of limbo is not the worst way in which to end a film, especially one where the storytelling itself is the aspect of the film that veers from guarded hope to fatalism, where each of the characters is seen on this deserted island as not being able to run away from their problems anymore.
REVIEWED ON 910/99 GRADE: A
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
ozus@sover.net
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