‘Adrift’ is a storm-tossed tale of adventure.
See more movie reviews in Showtime
A highly seaworthy star performance from “Divergent” trilogy captain Shailene Woodley battles an onslaught of Category 4-level flashbacks in “Adrift.” This is the factbased drama of what happened to Tami Oldham (now Tami Oldham Ashcraft) when she set sail in 1983 from Tahiti to San Diego with her fiance, Englishman Richard Sharp. Their craft was a 44-foot yacht, their adversary was Hurricane Raymond, which they met a few weeks into their planned 4,000-mile trek. The hurricane whipped up 40-foot waves and 140-knot winds. Clearly, this story was destined for the movies.
Woodley, now 26, served as producer of “Adrift” as well as star, and while this may sound patronizing, it’s worth noting: She actually looks, moves and responds like someone who knows her way around a craft on water, as opposed to an actress who recently completed a crash course on faking nautical skills for the camera. Good thing, because most of the picture depends on her, and secondarily on Sam Claflin, who plays Richard.
The rest is covered by convincing if somewhat hammy digital effects, and on scenes set months earlier, on Tahiti, from the couple’s past. These are meant to illustrate the depth of
their love and the inevitability of their journey, though as written by Aaron Kandell, Jordan Kandell and David Branson Smith, they also serve to get the audience thinking: Back to the crisis, if you don’t mind.
Here we get into questions of adaptation, and of spoiler issues. Icelandicborn director Baltasar Kormakur’s picture begins with an injured Tami jolted awake, the battered yacht now on calm seas. Richard is nowhere to be seen; soon enough, however, she spies him clinging to a dinghy, and rescues him.
“Adrift” works on two timelines: As the flashbacks move ever-closer to the hurricane itself, the present-tense action progresses, ticking off the days and weeks of the yacht adrift, ultimately revealing certain truths about Tami’s predicament. (The title of her 2002 memoir that inspired the screenplay suggests that predicament more directly.)
It makes for a fairly gripping and refreshingly small-scale disaster movie. But there’s a “but.” The “but” is everything designed to get us interested in these two before the heavy weather. The breezy courtship sequences feel stiff; the writing’s generic in the extreme. On their first date, Richard tells Tami sailing alone is full of adversity and loneliness and seasickness. “If it’s not fun,” she wonders, “then why do you do it?” His answer may well be close to what the real Richard said (the “intensity” of it, the feeling of being “reborn,” etc.) but Claflin’s exertions don’t convince. He’s a talented actor but too often, especially in these bashfully smitten getting-to-knowyou scenes, it’s as if he’s being paid per ingratiation.
Uncharacteristically, Woodley struggles a bit in these scenes as well, though her instincts are generally terrific (and have been, ever since “The Descendants”; she played George Clooney’s tetchy elder daughter). Movies like this one, whether set on water (“All is Lost,” with Robert Redford) or in a slot canyon (“127 Hours,” with James Franco), reveal to us the worst of what an adventurer sometimes faces, alone or otherwise. These stories are overwhelmingly male; this one, for once, is female-driven.
They never quite got the script right, but director Kormakur toggles well enough. And Woodley sees it through.