Stormy crossing
Shailene Woodley dives deep to play a sea-stranded hurricane survivor in the new thriller from Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur. It doesn’t seem much of a stretch for the hippie-ish Woodley to play real-life Tami Oldham, a globe-trotting free spirit whose 1983 sailing voyage from Tahiti to San Diego with her fiancé (Sam Claflin) went horribly wrong when the boat they were being paid to transport unexpectedly collided with a Category 4 storm. But “Adrift” is paced like its title, and the story’s momentum is slowed somewhat by constant toggling between past and present. Kormákur opens on Tami jolting to consciousness in a battered and waterlogged yacht, then dials back five months to her first meeting with Richard Sharp (Claflin), a fellow wanderer with a love of the open ocean and a 36-foot sailboat he built himself. Much of the movie was shot in Fiji, and its natural beauty is stunning, even when Tami is staring down the prospect of nearcertain death during 41 harrowing days before rescue. Somewhat less riveting is the chemistry between Woodley and Claflin, which may or may not have to do with the seasickness that reportedly plagued the cast and crew while shooting. Woodley does most of the heavy lifting, as Tami rescues the badly injured Richard after the ship is wrecked and nurses him on the remains of the yacht with what little food supplies they have left. A scene in which she discovers a jar of peanut butter and feeds it to him is the most passionate moment in the film.
As in 2015’s “Everest,” Kormákur is at his best exploring what motivates certain people to chase after nature’s most extreme adventures. Though Tami and Richard aren’t storm chasers, both come from deeply dysfunctional families and seem happiest when at their most literally untethered. Early in their relationship, after Richard lists a litany of reasons why sailing is nearly always physically uncomfortable, Tami asks him why he does it. “It’s a feeling I can’t describe,” he shrugs. Later, when Tami’s sunburned, starving, hallucinating and yet meditating naked on the ship’s deck, you get a more visceral rendition of that philosophy. As a tribute to a real-life survival story (Oldham, still a sailor today, makes an appearance at the end), “Adrift” is worth a watch, even if its drama (perhaps inevitably) pales in comparison to the source material. Running time: 120 minutes. Rated PG-13 (profanity, gore). Now playing.