In 2004, I interviewed James Elkins, an academic who wrote Pictures & Tears, a history of art that exists primarily to make people cry. The only way to relieve their wretchedness is to cut away from the action and return 25 years later, at which point one or two final indignities are tossed in for good measure. Let's just say the layers of tragedy that are heaped upon these characters create a Dagwood sandwich of misfortune. As surely as that lighthouse beam will swing round again, the baby's mother is certain to come looking for her - and in the fiercely distraught person of Rachel Weisz, no less.Īh, but I have ventured further into the plot than the trailer reveals. With the film's tone already set in salt - and magnified by Alexandre Desplat's soaring yet ominous score - there's very little pleasure to be had in watching the couple bask in the warmth of parenthood. They begin an increasingly intimate correspondence, the letters transported by supply boats, and marry not long after. Just before hopping on the launch that will take him to his new island home 100 miles away, there's a bit of mutual eye-catching between Tom and Isabel ( Alicia Vikander), a businessman's fetching daughter. What better perch to attempt escaping the demons no armistice can squelch? Tom has returned to his native Australia to become keeper of the most remote lighthouse the maritime nation has to offer. His thousand-yard stare, masterfully enacted by Michael Fassbender and studiously held for the film's entire length, betrays the horrors he has seen. The sorrow descends from the first frame, when we are greeted by the mournful eyes of Tom, a poor soul who has just emerged from four years in the slaughterhouse that was World War I. Because my wife's book club hasn't gotten around to that novel yet, I can only assume the tearjerker that started it all is likewise as rollicking as a mortician's funeral. Stedman's 2012 best-seller of the same name. This story of a lighthouse keeper and his wife who find a baby adrift in a dinghy and adopt it as their own - to say nothing of the heartbreaking circumstances that bookend their miraculous discovery - precipitates more than two hours of abject despondency in writer-director Derek Cianfrance's magnificently filmed, exquisitely acted new movie.
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