It’s not a shore thing
Beautiful Fassbender-Vikander film hits some rough seas
AFTER burying two prematurely born babies, a young married couple is riven by their mutual agony. Then a boat washes ashore with a dead man and a living baby girl.
In the 1920s-set drama “The Light Between Oceans,” the couple (Michael Fassbender, as a deeply scarred World War I veteran, and Alicia Vikander, as the local girl who agrees to live with him in a lighthouse on an otherwise deserted island) makes a fateful decision to pretend the child is their own. Naturally, they run into the child’s mom (Rachel Weisz) when they return to the Australian mainland.
Beautifully photographed and acted, with a somberly affecting tone, the film, by Derek Cianfrance, is nevertheless marred by severely contrived elements. Would a man being harassed by an angry mob flee via the slowest conceivable method — a rowboat? You might as well hitch a ride on the nearest tortoise. And why would he take a baby with him? Some criminaljustice issues that develop later in the film are also hard to swallow.
Still, as Tom and Isabel, Fassbender and Vikander make the film work — just. Each of the leads is hollowed and enervated by sorrow, with the unexpected baby providing them with renewed purpose, just as Tom’s lighthouse, perched between the Indian and Pacific oceans, steers sailors away from the rocks. Fassbender plays Tom as wracked and emptied by his four years on the Western front, while Vikander, one of the most captivating actresses on Earth, sensitively renders Isabel’s devastation.
Cianfrance, who became a much-lauded director on the basis of the exceptional films “Blue Valentine” and “The Place Beyond the Pines,” has taken a half-step backward here. Though he invariably paints a pretty picture, he isn’t delving as deeply into his characters as before. That creates opportunities for the actors to tell the story with their faces, but Cianfrance, who also wrote the script based on M.L. Stedman’s novel, doesn’t meaningfully explore Tom’s survivor’s guilt, and occasionally the dialogue strays into hokey territory: “You still have a light inside you” is a typical line of Isabel’s. Previously Cianfrance never strayed to the wrong side of the line between soulful and soapy. In this film he sometimes does.