FLIGHT DELAYED
‘aloft’ weaves together different tales and timelines, but the dreamy flick doesn’t have enough substance or plot to achieve liftoff
Lead balloon. Running time: 95 minutes. Rated R (language, intense situations). Now playing.
P ERUVIAN director Claudia Llosa’s vaguely magical-realist drama is stark and wintry in its otherworldly settings, but trying to figure out the point of it all feels more like being lost in a deep fog. The plot zigzags between two timelines: that of a mother named Nana (Jennifer Connelly) and her two young sons Ivan and Gully (Zen and Winta McGrath), one of whom has a serious illness and the other a fondness for falconry; and that of the grown Ivan (Cillian Murphy), still a falconer, who teams up with an ailing documentarian (Mélanie Laurent) searching for Nana 20 years after she abandoned her family.
Linking the stories is the notion of faith healing. In the opening scene, Nana takes Ivan and Gully to meet a man known as the Architect (William Shimell), who’s built a mysterious house of twigs that people come from miles around to take a lotteried chance at entering, for very nebulous reasons. Later, the Architect informs a skeptical Nana that she, like him, has a gift for healing — which eventually sees her becoming a reclusive and sought-after guru based in the Arctic wilderness.
Murphy, whose adult Ivan lives with his family (his wife’s played by Oona Chaplin of “Game of Thrones”) in a cluttered hovel, is always a compelling presence — and really seems like a natural with those hulking, hooded birds. But you don’t get a sense of who Ivan is beyond his anger at Nana’s abandonment. Likewise, we’re never given a straight-on look at any of Llosa’s characters: Connelly and Laurent are both talented performers, but even the best generally need some dialogue, or action, that explains who they are and why we should care. Llosa’s tableau are also striking — there is a suggestion here that this is a futuristic wasteland — but their back story is elusive to the point of meaninglessness. “Aloft” is less like a story than a dream, populated with gorgeous people and symbolism you can interpret any way you like.