Endless heartbreak weighs down ‘Light’
Finding baby doesn’t work out well for anyone in this film
The wholly tear-jerking drama
The Light Between Oceans doesn’t just touch the heart. It rips the darn thing out, stomps on it a few times and then throws it overboard without an anchor.
Well-acted but often painfully melodramatic, writer/director Derek Cianfrance’s adaptation ( out of four; rated PG-13; in theaters nationwide Friday) of M.L. Stedman’s 2012 novel tackles true love, exceeding amounts of loss and just a teensy bit of hope in the lives of a returning World War I hero and his soulmate. While gorgeously shot and featuring a phenomenal score, Light proves a very tough watch for the more emotional moviegoer, courtesy of its characters’ downward spiral of morally questionable decision-making.
Haunted by his experiences on the Western Front, stoic Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender) ends up in Western Australia and, yearning for quiet solitude, takes a job seemingly no one else wants as the lighthouse keeper on the remote island of Janus Rock. He’s not solo for long: He’s quickly bewitched by young girl Isabel (Alicia Vikander), who ends up proposing to him in one of their first meetings.
The first act is a lovey-dovey affair as they quickly fall in love, with a lush coastal landscape as background made more wondrous by Alexandre Desplat’s majestic and stirring string and piano melodies. Even though they don’t seem to have a whole lot in common, at least the setting is ripe for romance. It’s going so well, in fact, that their biggest conflict is Tom’s bushy mustache.
One literal storm later, their lives are torn asunder. After babycrazy Isabel suffers two miscarriages, an infant washes up with a dead man on a lifeboat. Tom wants to alert his superiors, but Isabel talks him out of it so they can raise little Lucy as their own.
The gut punches come quickly and heavily as guilt begins to divide them, actions with good intentions create even more stumbles and a new player enters the drama: Hannah Roennfeldt (Rachel Weisz), a heartbroken woman who just happened to have lost her husband and child around the same time Tom and Isabel “adopted” their girl.
The manipulative tugging of the plot gets in the way of character development, most likely a victim of the page-to-screen adaptation. Neither Tom nor Isabel is particularly fleshed out, so by the time they start veering toward bad decisions, the audience isn’t fully engaged.
Even though most of the movie is spent with the couple, Hannah actually seems to be a deeper character simply because there are flashbacks to a time before tragedy struck — it’s assumed but not shown why Isabel wants to be a mom so badly or why Tom is determined to punish himself for what happened during the war.
Cianfrance, who also helmed the powerful Blue Valentine, does show an innate knack for telling a gripping story that doesn’t let any of its characters off easy — pretty much everybody is faced with turmoil, even the child — or the moviegoer. So if creating crippling heartbreak that’s nearly impossible to shake off is the goal, then consider Light bright with success.