I came to movies after Robert Redford had had his most successful films. Oh sure, I’ve seen a couple. I even liked a lot of them. The man is a talented actor who oozes onscreen charisma. He also seems to stay busy while maybe not appearing in just anything. There was even a rumor he may or may not be retired that, as I type this, I am feeling far too lazy to look up and verify one way or the other right now.
So, what if there was a movie made with hardly any spoken dialogue and he was the only actor onscreen for the run of the film? That’s what All Is Lost essentially is.
There isn’t much in the way of dialogue in All Is Lost, and most of it comes in a bit of opening narration. That comes in the form of a note the unnamed protagonist writes before he believes he’s about to die. Redford stars as a character billed in the closing credits as “our man,” and the only other voice heard in the entire movie is a brief message over a radio. That’s it. The man is on a voyage alone in the Indian Ocean. His sailboat has hit a shipping container that got washed off a cargo ship from the looks of things, and there’s a large hole in the man’s boat. From here, it becomes a fight for survival as the man does everything he can think of to try and survive his personal situation.
That is basically the movie. From where I was sitting, it did look like the man knew what he was doing and wasn’t making any major mistakes. Everything that went wrong for him could be chalked up to dumb luck. He was able, for example, to patch the hole in his boat and even pump out the water with a handpump, but his electronic equipment was largely damaged. He seems to know how to repair things and keep going in the direction he wants to go in, but he can’t control the weather. When he does pass some cargo ships, his own craft is far too small to be seen even with a flare gun. Every disaster leaves him with less in the way of supplies or a chance to survive. Through it all, the man keeps struggling against what may be the inevitable.
Now, a movie like this, it may be a bit of a wonder why Robert Redford of all people would be the sole actor. That’s no knock on Redford, but he has no one to play off on, and there really isn’t much of a character to ‘our man”. He’s a stand-in for any human being in a situation like this, so why go for such a recognizable face? Age is a factor, but couldn’t any older actor pull of the same role? My best guess is that it is because his face, after decades of acting work, is so recognizable that it was seen as a good way to give the audience a connection to a character that, again, doesn’t really have a chance to do anything but show off survival skills.
To that end, the movie works very well. Writer/director J.C. Chandor knows how to build tension, showing the boat at one point, tossed in a tropical storm, rolling over and over with Redford in the cabin getting tossed around as everything around him keeps flipping over and over. The boat initially looks rather comfortable, and again, the man seems to know what he needs to do in order to survive. The only problem there is even knowing what to do may not be enough in the grand scheme of things. Then it becomes more about dwindling hope, such that one of the rare moments of spoken dialogue is when the protagonist utters a big, loud bit of profanity, shocking and loud enough that it spooked my cat and got her to leave the sofa and hide for a few minutes. If you want a movie with a well-developed character interacting with others, this isn’t for you. If you want a lone man’s fight for survival against a world that seems to be out to get him, then this would make for a very good choice.
Grade: B+
0 Comments