Robert Redford Battles the Elements in ‘All is Lost’

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CHICAGO – Few films have captured the intensity of fighting against the inevitable pull of Mother Nature as J.C. Chandor’s gut-wrenching “All is Lost,” a showcase for Robert Redford like he hasn’t had in years and further proof that the writer/director of “Margin Call” is one to watch. With a bare minimum of dialogue (there may be 75 seconds of it in the entire film) and camerawork that never feels flashy, “All is Lost” transports viewers into a waterlogged nightmare. In a year in which intense tales of survival are earning Oscar buzz (“Gravity,” “Captain Phillips”), Chandor’s stands tall.

Credited only as “Our Man,” Redford is the only cast member of “All is Lost,” a man who was sailing in waters far from shore when his boat is hit by a floating cargo container. A giant hole is torn in the side of the ship but Our Man patches it relatively well, looking as if he may survive the disaster. A lot of this is seen in what feels like real-time, as we watch Our Man detach the container from the hull of his vessel, hang from the side of the boat to patch the hole, and look to the skies in the hope of good weather.

All is Lost
All is Lost
Photo credit: Roadside Attractions

The breach may be patched but the incident left Our Man with damaged navigation and radio equipment as well. He’s drifting, using old techniques to chart his way to a shipping lane, where he prays a passing ship will pull him from the big blue. His situation gets more urgent after a horrendous storm that leaves his boat sinking again. As the sun beats his face into blisters, the sharks circle, and all signs of other life seem far over the horizon, his chances of survival seem to dwindle with every passing minute.

J.C. Chandor walks that fine line between realism and entertainment with “All is Lost” and traverses that tonal tightrope in ways that filmmakers with significantly more experience couldn’t manage. “All is Lost” is not pure realism a la Paul Greengrass. The cinematography by Frank G. DeMarco and Peter Zuaccarini never calls attention to itself and yet is also not the shaky-cam coverage that we’ve come to expect in a film like this one. There are shots, particularly the underwater ones, that have a striking beauty to them. This deadly part of the world that can kill you with sun, water, or animal is also gorgeous. And Chandor and his team create surprisingly strong visual compositions given the lack of material they have to work with in terms of storytelling. It’s not as flashy as, say, “Life of Pi,” but I found it often just as mesmerizing.

All is Lost
All is Lost
Photo credit: Roadside Attractions

If the cinematic approach to the natural world has its beauty, Chandor allows Redford to carry the human gravity of the situation. It’s such a remarkably non-showy performance, allowed almost no dialogue to express the intensity of his predicament. Redford finds ways to convey the increasing desperation of his character that don’t need language. As the film progresses, Redford’s performance intensifies in the most subtle of ways as both he and Chandor completely avoid the melodrama that most other actor-director combinations would have embraced. You tell most actors that they don’t have any dialogue to work with and you can reasonably expect them to over-act with their face and body, using those as the crutches to replace what they usually express with words. Redford’s performance is most remarkable for its subtlety.

“All is Lost” is an admittedly tough sell – less than two minutes of dialogue and a story that feels increasingly depressing. It’s not going to be a “feel-good” hit. And yet this is one of those films that I believe will have cross-demo appeal and word-of-mouth success. Not only does it remind us why Robert Redford became the living legend that he is today but it gets at something beyond language, something to which all age groups and ethnicity can relate – the will to survive.

“All is Lost” stars Robert Redford and is written and directed by J.C. Chandor. It opens in Chicago tomorrow, October 25, 2013.

HollywoodChicago.com content director Brian Tallerico

By BRIAN TALLERICO
Content Director
HollywoodChicago.com
brian@hollywoodchicago.com

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