All is Lost (3/5 Stars)

Old Man Redford and the Sea

Talk about doing something completely different. Writer/Director J.C. Chandor’s last movie (and also his first feature) was Margin Call, a movie whose brilliance shown through how efficiently and succinctly an absolute ton of exposition could be told almost entirely through dialogue. That movie took place during one climatic night at a big bank where all the different players came together and decided to rip off all their clients and business associates in order to save their own hides. By the end you knew who everyone was, what their function at the bank was, where they came from, and quite a bit about the secondary market of residential home mortgage loans. At the same time, the plot never stalled and the suspense of the main storyline never abated. It was a true achievement in writing netting Chandor his first Oscar Nomination for Original Screenplay.

Contrast that with All is Lost, which has only one character who doesn’t speak at all, unless you count SOS calls, mumbled grunts, and one loud frustrated epithet. Robert Redford plays the man and from now on I will refer to the man as Old Man Redford because the movie does not bother to give him a name. Casting is almost everything in a movie such as this because the writer, at least as a master of dialogue, has essentially written himself out of the story and given the task of making sure what needs to be conveyed is conveyed by the actor. And here Old Man Redford steps up very well with such precision in facial expressions and physical movements that at times it can seem that you are reading Old Man Redford’s mind. One thing that this movie has in common with Margin Call is how effectively information is conveyed (even though it is conveyed in completely opposite ways). It is the sort of display that garners tremendous confidence in the storytelling skills of the director. I look forward to anything Chandor does in the future.

I can’t give anyway any of the plot because so much of the movie is simply procedural storytelling. What you can know is that a shipping container rams into Old Man Redford’s sailboat in the middle of the night causing a big hole in the side and ruining his radio and phone. The rest of the movie he deals with this problem. Given that the enjoyment of the movie comes from witnessing how he deals with it, this will be a rather short vague review. What can be said though is that Old Man Redford, currently 77 years old, should be the talk of all his AARP meetings.

A lot of people are giving Oscar talk for Redford, which may or may not be warranted. I say he’s on the line here. This is the type of performance that I think can be fairly argued is one of those that garners praise because it happened at all, not because it was a great performance. It’s the age that makes it impressive. Old Man Redford is really old. He should not be out in the middle of the Indian Ocean dealing with storm surges. I wonder if anyone on the set was concerned for his mortality during the shooting of the movie. Is that a fair thing to judge a performance on? I mean if a middle-aged actor put on a bunch of old man makeup for the same role and got everything correct, would we think it was just a good of a performance? Or are we giving Old Man Redford more credit because what he is doing is more than ordinary for someone his age.  

There is one other thing that is stopping this very good but small movie from being great and that is competition. Specifically Gravity and Captain Phillips, two very good movies with very much the same themes that came out in the same month. I expect All is Lost to be overshadowed a bit by those two. It should be. The other movies are better.