[D66] All is Lost...

[R.O.]

Wat Goudsmit ons eigenlijk wilde mededelen kon men uit de zomergastfilm 
concluderen:

ALL IS LOST!

(Maar wie was toch die reddende hand...?)

+++

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/dec/26/all-is-lost-review
All Is Lost – review

Robert Redford’s near-mute performance as a mysterious old man of the 
sea adrift and utterly alone makes for a bold, gripping thriller
Robert Redford in All Is Lost
An existential dead cat bounce … Robert Redford in All Is Lost

Published on Thu 26 Dec 2013 10.30 GMT

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JC Chandor's All Is Lost is a quasi-silent movie, or perhaps rather 
quasi-mute, portraying the ordeal of a lone sailor in a desperate 
situation: he is played with grizzled impassivity by the 77-year-old 
Robert Redford. Throughout the film, he is the only person on screen. 
There is no one and nothing but him, his damaged boat and the vast sea 
and sky. It a performance at once intimate and yet entirely opaque. To 
the very last, Redford withholds his character from us. Who is this man? 
Why has he embarked on such a remote and surely hazardous journey, so 
challenging that the disaster he encounters seems to be his predictable 
destiny? Does he think about the family, loved ones and friends that he 
has left behind? Who knows? Redford's craggily unreadable, Mount 
Rushmore expression might be appropriate for a drama by Beckett, one of 
whose famous titles might serve here – Endgame.

He speaks only around half a page's worth of text throughout the entire 
film, and that is mostly a voiceover monologue at the very beginning, 
about his awful predicament, that may or may not be a mental transcript 
of the message he finally scribbles on a piece of paper, seals in a jar 
and throws into the sea. The movie-shipboard convention of a "captain's 
logbook" being read aloud does not apply. Yet for all the film's 
austerity and silence, it is absorbing and gripping, although you may be 
unsure about the faint and surreal touch of James Cameron's Titanic that 
finally surfaces, and indeed about the ambiguous ending itself.

The title voices the definitive moment of despair: the irreversible 
letting go of the rope, the moment at which the sailor finally confronts 
the reality of the situation. It is possible to watch this film with the 
sole intention of deciding when this moment occurs – when his intention 
to survive turns into an intention to accept death. It could be that 
this moment never entirely arrives.

Redford's ancient mariner begins the drama asleep in his craft when he 
is awoken by an almighty crunch. He ascends to find that a huge metal 
container unit has slipped off from one of the colossal ships from the 
nearby shipping lanes and, through a quirk of fate, smashed into his 
fragile boat. Water is pouring in, effectively ruining his radio 
transmitter and computer navigation systems. His attempts to repair his 
craft and his equipment soon reveal themselves to be quite futile, and 
he is so submerged in crisis that the moments when he is physically 
underwater seem no more dismaying than when he is above the waterline.

Yet he is clearly tough, resourceful, calm; when he finally says 
something into the sputtering radio transmitter, there is an amusing 
moment when he has to cough and clear his throat, like all people who 
try speaking after protracted silence. He is Crusoe without Man Friday, 
or indeed Major Tom without Ground Control, and unlike Sandra Bullock's 
astronaut in Gravity, Redford never hears anything intelligible at all. 
He never even swears much: a restrained "Shh … " at one point, and 
finally a "Fuck!" directed at the heavens. Even Job might have been 
permitted as much. Chandor largely avoids closeups: he keeps his camera 
away from Redford's face, as if reluctant to discover his emotions, 
reluctant to scan his unspeaking star for clues to how he is feeling.

The utter solitude is almost vertiginous. Redford's silent lone sailor 
is the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it. And all his 
activity directed at remedying the problem – intelligent and focused, 
capable and professional – appears also to be pointless. The game is up. 
Everything he's doing could be just an existential dead cat bounce: the 
entire drama works well as a parable of old age. He could as well be at 
home, on dry land, pottering around the house in his late 70s, losing 
his sight and hearing, the news of impending mortality pouring in 
through the windows like seawater.

It is fascinating and even moving to see Robert Redford take such a 
demanding role, in which he is on screen all the time. Watching All Is 
Lost, I found myself reflecting on his beautiful youth, in which he gave 
us all such pleasure in movies such as The Candidate, Butch Cassidy, The 
Sting, All the President's Men. I even found myself remembering his 
enjoyable but overlooked comedy The Great Waldo Pepper. Now his career 
voyage has taken him to this extraordinary everyman crisis. Warren 
Beatty alone in the desert or Burt Reynolds in an abandoned space 
station would not have had the same effect. What a strikingly bold and 
thoughtful film.