No drama in Casey Affleck’s dystopia
Casey Affleck has appeared in a vast range of movies, but when it comes to the work that defines him as an actor he has long demonstrated a certain penchant for slow-cooked artisanal cinema — for films that revel in their high-mindedness and move at a snail’s pace to prove it, including “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” and, “Manchester by the Sea,” the brilliantly tragic drama that gave Affleck his finest role and won him the Academy Award.
So it makes sense that “Light of My Life,” the first movie Affleck has written and directed, is cut from the same consciously meandering, slow-burn indie-art-house cloth. In theory, it’s a dystopian family-fights-to-survive-in-themidst-of-oblivion saga, with hints of the sci-fi apocalypse, like “The Road” or “A Quiet Place.” But Affleck has taken this familiar form and carved it down to the barest of bones.
Shot in the Okanaga Valley of British Columbia, a woodland countryside with the mood of a stark gray late afternoon, “Light of My Life” is about a father, who is never named, played by Affleck, and his daughter, nicknamed Rag (Anna Pniowsky), who’s 11 years old and has a short and thatchy boy’s haircut, because she’s pretending to be his son. The reason for that is that the two are in the middle of a deadly global plague, one that attacks only women, the majority of whom have apparently died off. (Rag was born at the epidemic’s outset.)
Rag’s mother, played in flashback by Elizabeth Moss, fell victim to the plague. We see a shot of her inspecting the rash on her torso, and except for one other brief scene with two skeletal corpses who’ve been dead for years, that’s as graphic (and specific) as the film gets about its premise.
“Light of My Life” takes the ultimate minimal approach to survivalist tension: It’s a father and daughter, wandering from the woods to an
just
abandoned farmhouse, escaping back into the wilderness, then on to another home (this one occupied by three men who’ve been living there for four years and somehow have food to spare).
“Light of My Life” is like a horror film that refuses to be a horror film, because it’s got purer things on its mind: the unshakable bond between father and daughter, and the way the hell they’re in strengthens and deepens that connection. Unfortunately, that isn’t quite enough to sustain a dawdling two-hour movie. Scene for scene, Affleck does a decent job of directing — his touch is soft, intimate, humane — but he has saddled himself with a script that isn’t entirely there.
Affleck and Pniowsky get a tender, heartfelt, but rather passive rapport going. He lectures her (a lot), and she’s not afraid to tweak him back. But there’s never much conflict between them. They’ve got each other’s backs, which is fine, but that robs the movie of its key potential source of tension.
There’s a reason, I think, why there’s so little drama in “Light of My Life.” The title is a clue. It’s meant to testify to the devotion this father feels toward his daughter. Affleck is showing off his knightly valor, his capacity for empathy, his drive to understand and defend the female in his care. But you have to wonder if there’s an element of spin to that. Around the time he was up for the Oscar, Affleck got raked over the coals for his own alleged misdeeds with women. And though it didn’t scuttle his awards triumph, the karma of those accusations lingered.
For a guy who often plays moody misfits, Affleck has crafted “Light of My Life” to be the story of a gruffly protective saint. At the same time, the fantasy of a fatal disease that attacks only women plays, at moments, like a borderline punitive comment on that whole topic. It’s the “Handmaid’s Tale” of pandemics.