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The special effects? A damp squib. The dialogue? Drippy. But superb Shailene Woodley as a lone sailor all at sea is simply...
Given the title, it’s no surprise that Adrift begins with incontrovertible evidence of disaster. A young woman regains consciousness in the flooded cabin of a dismasted yacht. Judging by her desperate screams – ‘Richard, Richard!’ – her boyfriend is missing. So far, so very like All Is Lost, the 2013 Robert Redford film about a veteran yachtsman facing a similar catastrophe.
And if we start with a disaster, we all know there’s only one way the story will be going and that’s backwards. Sure enough, up pops the caption: ‘Five months earlier…’ and we’re off. Predictable it may be, but Adrift – not to be confused with the nautical thriller of the same name from a decade or so ago, about a group of swimmers who can’t get back on board their motor yacht – does have one original thing going for it, and that’s Shailene Woodley, who plays the central character of Tami.
Unlike Redford, Colin Firth in the recent Donald Crowhurst biopic The Mercy, or that poor Icelandic fisherman in The Deep – a film I mention only because the same director, Baltasar Kormakur, also directs here – Woodley is very much a woman and a young woman at that, a fact that Kormakur’s at times slightly voyeuristic camera has clearly noticed. Woodley, however, who movie-wise at least was discovered alongside George Clooney in The Descendants, made famous by The Fault In Our Stars and made rich by the Divergent franchise, is exactly what this film – based loosely on a true story, like so many other sailing dramas – needs.
She’s female but feisty, girlnext-door attractive rather than drop-dead Hollywood gorgeous, and, at 26, only a couple of years older than the real-life Tami was when disaster befell her in 1983. In other words, she brings a realism, a convincing credibility if you like, to an otherwise potentially rather too familiar story. No offence to co-star Sam Claflin, but the film’s at its best when Woodley commands her watery stage alone.
Which early on isn’t that often, as Kormakur establishes our back story with the handsome Englishman Richard sailing into Tahiti on a boat he built himself and instantly catching the eye of the free-spirited Californian girl who will do any job that pays enough to keep her on her travels. She’s in no hurry to go back to San Diego quite yet.
But Tami and the slightly older Richard click, and then an older British couple – needing to return home in a hurry – ask Richard, a highly experienced yachtsman, to sail their rather lovely boat back to California. Dies have been cast, fates sealed.
Now I’m a big Claflin fan, but here the Love, Rosie and Me Before You star is not at his best. His screen chemistry with Woodley feels forced and, as Kormakur switches between romantic past and disastrous present, it’s definitely more down to her than him that we feel her anguish when she fears he is lost and her relief when she spots him through the stormy seas, badly injured and clinging to
an upturned dinghy. But it’s not all Claflin’s fault; it soon becomes clear that this is very much a Shailene Woodley film and his strictly a supporting role.
I ought to warn you that there is one big plot device that another time I might have taken exception to, not least because I have taken exception to something similar very recently and surely ought to be consistent.
But it’s all about the execution and here, as Richard and Tami’s yacht drifts endlessly in the Pacific, Kormakur gets this one spot on.
Elsewhere, the special effects needed to conjure up a convincing hurricane are, to briefly embrace the language of the shipping forecast, somewhere between ‘moderate’ and ‘good’, while some of the dialogue – ‘When did you become so wild?’ Answer: ‘What does that even mean?’ – definitely belongs in the ‘becoming poor later’ category.
In other words, it’s Woodley alone, as the extraordinarily resourceful Tami, who makes this watery weepie worth catching.
‘Woodley alone, as the resourceful Tami, makes this watery weepie worth catching’