Luminous performances
The Light Between Oceans gives off its own distinctive glow
Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander are two of the greatest actors working today. The Irish hunk can twist his face into the ghost of a sad smile that will haunt you for days; the Swedish beauty is conquering the world one accent at a time.
They meet in 1920s Australia, where he gives her one of those looks and they never look back. (They also fell in love for real, if you follow these things.) His character, Tom Sherbourne, is a First World War vet who has just signed up to look after a lighthouse on Janus Rock, 100 miles off the coast. (The fictional island is beautifully portrayed by New Zealand’s Cape Campbell.)
Vikander’s Isabel Graysmark falls hard for the taciturn yet gentle soldier, marries him and relocates to the island. Plans for a family are thwarted by two miscarriages; then one day a rowboat lands on the beach, its passengers a dead man and a newborn girl. It’s a soap-opera moment, and not the last, but the depth of the characters is enough that we go along with this development, and the future dilemmas that flow from it.
Much credit must go to director Derek Cianfrance
who also adapted M.L. Stedman’s popular 2012 novel. He has a way of taking details from the book and working them unobtrusively into dialogue, or turning a paragraph of description into a single shot — the plight of veterans becomes an image of amputees at a train station, for instance.
It’s also worth noting the contributions of cinematographer Adam Arkapaw (an Emmy winner for TV’s and
in the painterly widescreen compositions; and of Alexandre Desplat, whose dreamy music wafts through the scenes. In one sublime moment, the sound of a piano being tuned gradually morphs into the movie’s score.
And we haven’t even got to the part played by Rachel Weisz as Hannah Roennfeldt, though perhaps the less revealed about her character the better. Suffice to say that when she first appears, the movie rolls the plot back to tell us more about her scandalous (for the time), marriage to a German. And that Tom’s subsequent actions, trying to assuage his guilt, play out as inadvertently cruel.
Janus is named for the twofaced Roman god, from whence comes the name of the month January. The rock looks out on two oceans, and away from civilization as well as back to it. In a similar vein,
has one eye on the coming awards season, the other on delivering some wonderfully weepy entertainment. Expect success on both fronts.