Strong performances can't save dark, sluggish 'Light Between Oceans'
Give credit to writer/director Derek Cianfrance for attempting to become the next David Lean with his ambitiously mounted, well-acted, literature-credentialed Australian mini-epic "The Light Between Oceans."
This period drama, based on M.L. Stedman's 2012 best-seller, luxuriates in long, lingering shots of water, landscapes and placid characters gazing into shimmering sunsets.
The story, a classic tragedy involving a desperate couple's single fateful choice, should be the stuff of great drama.
Yet, "The Light Between Oceans" remains a perplexingly dark soap-operatic epic, its cinematography starved of contrast and key light, the editing sluggish and obvious, the slow-motion segments profoundly pretentious.
Imagine a mediocre "Masterpiece Theater" dreaming of being the next "Dr. Zhivago." Roughly, you'd get "The Light Between Oceans."
Michael Fassbender brings restrained gravitas to his Australian soldier Tom Sherbourne. He has come from the World War I Western Front after years of combat.
A quiet man with obvious emotional baggage, Tom takes a job as the lighthouse keeper on the lonely, foreboding island of Janus Rock.
He meets and marries a local woman named Isabel Graysmark (played by the charismatically chameleonic Alicia Vikander). She lives with him near the lighthouse. They try to create a family.
But two miscarriages plunge Isabel into despair that their dream of babies will never be realized.
Until the day a skiff floats up to their shore. They find a dead man and a baby in it.
Tom immediately thinks of contacting the authorities. But Isabel, thinking perhaps this could be a form of divinely timed intervention, persuades her husband to raise the child as their own. She recently had a miscarriage, so people on the mainland would naturally assume the baby belongs to them.
What could go wrong?
The whipping wind and austere landscapes capture the isolation and hardening affections of the couple as Tom succumbs to increasing guilt, and Isabel blindly fuels her raging maternal instincts.
Here the contrast-challenged cinematography (by Adam Arkapaw) might serve a purpose. The perfunctory editing and slow motion, not so much.
Cianfrance's 2010 "Blue Valentine" gave us a charming romance. His 2013 "Place Beyond the Pines" delivered an eccentric, interconnected anthology with each successive chapter diving in quality.
These bear little resemblance to "The Light Between Oceans," almost as if Cianfrance became intimidated by Stedman's literary tome and made his movie based on how he imagined an overly ambitious motion picture should be directed.
That might explain why "Oceans" resonates with carefully observed detail and atmospheric scene-setting that approximates a novel's literary strengths. But not cinematic ones.
Legendary Australian character actor Jack Thompson - a key figure in noted Aussie works such as "Breaker Morant" and "The Man From Snowy River" - is underused as a local man named Ralph.
Rachel Weisz bumps up her underwritten character Hannah - the long-grieving widow of the husband she presumes lost at sea with her baby - with devastating sadness emanating from her soul.
Terrific performances, all fallen through the dramatic crack between oceans.
“The Light Between the Oceans”
★ ★ ½
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Rachel Weisz, Jack Thompson, Florence Clary
Directed by: Derek Cianfrance
Other: DreamWorks Pictures release. Rated PG-13 for sexual situations. 100 minutes