The real-life story behind Eden, previously adapted into a documentary, has an irresistible hook: in the early 1930s, doctor-philosopher Friedrich Ritter and his wife Dora Strauch moved to the otherwise uninhabited island of Floreana, in the Galapagos archipelago, to remake society from the ground up. They were eventually joined by the Wittmers, a German family inspired by newspaper accounts of the Floreana experiment, and a fake Austrian baroness (plus her two lovers) who planned to build a luxury hotel there.
Within a year, most of them had died, fled, or disappeared. Eden, an early title card explains, is fictionalised from encounters from those that survived – a tantalising bit of foreshadowing, like the dead body teased in the flash-forward opening of every season of The White Lotus. Ron Howard’s film packs its trouble-in-paradise setup with the plot twists, cattiness and shrink-packaged social commentary of trash-highbrow pay-cable escapism.
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The year is 1932; “fascism is spreading” as a title card exposits. Ritter (Jude Law) and Dora (Vanessa Kirby), both atheist vegetarians, are building their shining city on a hill – Ritter by typing furiously at his typewriter while muttering “brilliant, brilliant” to himself, and Dora by hoeing the garden. As in Soderbergh’s Side Effects, Law (who wears a set of metallic false teeth, Ritter having removed his real set to prevent infection in the jungle) captures something of the arrogant, obsessive mania of the self-published author; Kirby, playing a woman who hoped to cure her Multiple Sclerosis by the power of will, limps imperiously, and is deeply attached to her burro. The two quote Nietzsche to each other.
They are not pleased when the Wittmers show up, played by a nebbish Daniel Brühl and Sydney Sweeney, attempting a hausfrau accent in the kind of ingénue-with-hidden-reserves-of-strength role that’s becoming her stock-in-trade. Naïve acolytes with a sickly son (and another on the way), they prove their mettle as homesteaders, commandeering the island’s only other spring before the arrival of the Baroness (Ana de Armas), carried ashore on the shoulders of her boy toys.
Despite the title, the cinemaphotography is grim and dip, hardly Edenic, and the drama that unfolds is a struggle for power and position on the island, as the three encampments trade (or steal) resources like canned food and firearms, and struggle for self-sufficiently against the cgi gnat swarms, poisonous creepy-crawlers, feral hogs and wild dogs. The Baroness, whose favourite book is ‘The Portrait of Dorian Gray’ – an aspirational fantasy, she says, of eternal youth – plays her lovers and the two couples against each other, a bitchy soap-opera villain meant to embody the spirit, apt for an island once visited by the HMS Beagle, of social Darwinism, or what one character calls “survival of the fittest.”
The film is meant to be a metaphor or microcosm of the problems of human society and the impossibility of living together, but the passages of Ritter’s book, with its pronouncements about democracy and fascism, and humanity’s innate animal nature, are a laughably shallow running commentary (“What is the true meaning of life? Pain”), and the dialogue is egregiously, rampantly anachronistic, in both word choice and worldview. “This is abuse,” intones Sweeney, at one point, about character, about the Baroness’s emotional manipulations; her grave tone of voice implies that European homemakers of the early 1930s would regularly have discussed interactions in terms of gaslighting and microaggressions.
As such, Eden is best when it’s most shameless about the historical record, spinning it into splashy camp. A naked knife fight, DIY dental surgery; Sweeney giving birth while fending off wild dogs, forcing out the baby with a wilful scream, and de Armas Zou Bisou’ing around her tent to the ‘Habanera’ from Carmen — these are the kinds of watercooler moments that make Sunday night television culturally sticky, and maybe a movie too.
