All Is Lost

We’re used to watch­ing movie boats go down in dra­mat­ic sequences fea­tur­ing ter­ri­ble weath­er and max yelling and clang­ing. Less seen but more real­is­tic (prob­a­bly — this writer has nev­er sunk at sea) is a man qui­et­ly focus­ing on patch­ing up an angry bite in an oth­er­wise func­tion­al ves­sel, life or death boiled down to the basic phys­i­cal issue of plug­ging a hole.

In this sim­ple sto­ry of one man fight­ing for his life, writer and direc­tor JC Chan­dor, shows great under­stand­ing of the basic struc­tur­al ele­ments of a sur­vival dra­ma and lets them stand stark­ly, as min­i­mal­ly as the husk of a shipwreck.

As ​‘Our Man’ Robert Red­ford finds him­self a long way from sun danc­ing immersed in ocean water after ship, the Vir­ginia Jean, knocks into an incom­pre­hen­si­ble bit of float­ing met­al. One bump is all it takes to set up a sto­ry with such sedate pac­ing that it’s eas­i­er to tune in and out of the sever­i­ty of the stakes.

Water is a hyp­not­ic ele­ment and as it pours into the bot­tom of the boat sat­u­rat­ing Our Man’s belong­ings and destroy­ing his com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­o­gy, there is none of the imme­di­ate per­il pre­sent­ed by mon­strous or psy­chot­ic dan­ger. Chan­dor cre­ates a calm atmos­phere where the most seduc­tive idea is of giv­ing in to the pull of Davy Jones’ lock­er. Join­ing lost heroes like Cap­tain Ahab and Jack Daw­son can’t be that bad can it?

But Our Man is sto­ic, shuf­fling through the motions of self-preser­va­tion at a fit­ting pace for a 77-year-old. Redford’s straw­ber­ry blonde mop with its strik­ing arti­fi­cial­i­ty detracts from the real­ism. His bounc­ing bonce is just the tip of the prob­lem. Rather than feel­ing like we’re adrift with an imper­iled old­ster, it feels like we’re adrift with Robert Red­ford, an icon of movie his­to­ry with — let’s face it — the restrained expres­sive tech­niques of a con­fi­dent idol. When new dan­gers appear, Red­ford frowns like a man won­der­ing what those damn kids are doing on his porch rather than some­one con­tend­ing with the reaper.

In this lo-fi water­world, all instru­ments need­ed to have been tuned and Red­ford is a bum note. Great moments exist, like when Our Man gets to deliv­er one per­fect word while an ambigu­ous end­ing throws every­thing into inter­est­ing relief. It would be unfair to say all is lost in these parts but the motor gives before the 105 min­utes have dripped past.