All is Lost

IN Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity , an astronaut is cut adrift into chilly outer space, where the silences are pregnant with existential dread. The terror of being unmoored in vast nothingness is as much emotional as it is physical: you can sense, in those thousands of empty miles hanging between the astronaut and her glistening emerald planet, her cosmic distance from family and human warmth.

In All is Lost, Robert Redford plays a nameless survivor waging his own war against the uncaring elements of nature. Here, the sea hurls itself against his lone boat with sublime disinterest for the mortal aboard. When his sailboat crashes into a shipping freight carrying a cargo of buoyant sneakers, its undersides are ruptured and he is forced to repair it himself.

Redford’s performance is one of wordless masculinity, the mute man’s man pitted against nature with the ferocious will to overcome disaster. In fact, when he does pierce the silence midway, it is only to hurl an anguished “fuck!” at a storm-gathered sky.

This is the film’s downfall. Redford never allows us access to his psychic and emotional inner sanctums. In Gravity Gravity , the solar system was turned into a prison of anxiety. The sea of All All is is Lost Lost splutters and ravages, but never manages to breach Redford’s emotional core. We spend most of the film in a stormy sprawl watching him, grim-faced, repairing and plotting rescue.

Any triumph to All is Lost will turn on the question of Redford’s solo and tongueless performance. But dredging up no real remorse or angst, the film becomes emptiedout of its complexity, a dull and simple metaphor.