After Years, a Second's Abandon Under THE WEIGHT OF WATER.
Written: Sep 25 '02 (Updated Oct 01 '02)
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Pros: First rate screenplay, direction, cast, photography and editing.
Cons: Evidently some critics and audiences don't appreciate Director Bigelow's vision. Several unresolved ambiguities.
The Bottom Line: Anita Shreve writes that her novel, The Weight of Water, is about "the random act, the consequences of a second's brief abandonment." That sums up Kathryn Bigelow's film, too.
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| macresarf1's Full Review: The Weight of Water |
Years ago, there was a double murder on Smutty Nose Island, off the coast of Maine; years later, questions rose about whether the right person had been hanged for the crime; years after that, New England writer Anita Shreve wrote a cult novel, The Weight of Water, using the second thoughts as a crucible for her narrative. In September 1999, Kathryn Bigelow (NEAR DARK, 1987) began shooting a movie based on the novel. Two years ago, I saw that film, THE WEIGHT OF WATER, at the San Francisco Film Festival. It opens Nationwide in November of this year. Thus, the Mills of the Hollywood Gods . . . .
The film follows pretty closely the course of the novel.
Jean Janes (Catherine McCormack), a photo journalist, has snagged a freelance assignment to illustrate a magazine re-examination of "The Isle of Shoales Murder Case," famous in legend around the summer tourist seaport towns of Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Using a guidebook and a transcript of the trial, she internalizes the facts of the case:
As an arranged bride, young Norwegian Maren Hontvedt (Sarah Polley) was brought by her much older fisherman husband John (Ulrich Thomsen) to primitive, bleak Smutty Nose Island, one of the Isles of Sholes off New Hampshire, in the late 1860's. The work of a fish wife in a rude wooden salt house was cruelly hard. Maren's husband regarded her as a cook and housekeeper, he was not very romantic, and she grew deeply lonely. Thinking to satisfy her, John sent to Norway for her spinster sister Karen (Katryn Cartlidge). Unfortunately, Karen saw the invitation as an excuse to have others take care of her, namely Maren. John hired a Prussian handyman, Louis Wagner (Ciaran Hines), to help him on the boat, in return for meals and a room in the attic, and, when not laid up with rheumatism, to do chores on the Island. To help defray whatever expense this luxury entailed, Maren's brother Evan Christenson (Anders Bethelson) and his bride Anethe (Vinessa Shaw) were brought from the Old Country to help. Young Anethe, it soon developed, found the housework hard and was starved for affection, too.
[As a suggestion how facts can complicate things, there was also often on the island John's brother, Mathew, but he does not figure in our legend.]
On the moonlit evening of March 6, 1873, six months after disgruntled Louis Wagner had quit and gone to live at a rooming house in Portsmouth, N.H. -- ironically, just as genteel tourism began to overhaul the treacherous fishing industry on that coast -- spinster Karen and bride Anethe were strangled and/or axed to death on Smutty Nose Island while John was on the mainland, selling his catch. The sole witness, Maren Hontvedt, said Wagner had come to the island and murdered her sister and sister-in-law. A couple of days later, Wagner was arrested in Boston, brought to trial in Maine (Smutty Nose being technically in its jurisdiction), convicted and hanged in 1875.
[Much of this story we get dramatized, sometimes with subtitles, at the beginning -- or in flashbacks, dreams, apparitions, etc, throughout the rest of the film.]
Jean Janes, based in Massachusetts, begins to have questions about the crime. She is inspired to take advantage of a yacht belonging to her brother-in-law, Rich Janes (Josh Lucas), to capture the photos she needs and explore on Smutty Nose the case further.
And so it is, on a warm Fall afternoon, leaving the children at home, she boards the boat with her husband Thomas (Sean Penn), Rich, and his girl Adaline Gunn (Liz Hurley), for a weekend at the "haunted place." The voyage is languidly uneventful, and they drop anchor off shore, in the lee of the island.
Life looks good.
While Jane trudges about on the rawly beautiful island, poking around in the old abandoned buildings, the others mostly loll on the yacht. Thomas is a popular novelist, I gather, who once was a Pulitzer Prize Poet. He is diffident, dismissive of his past accomplishments -- once an academic ladies man of the old school. The kind of guy who is careful not to unduly punish others with his smoking habit. Rich, the good skipper, shelters in his brother's former glory, and it turns out that the pungently sexy Adaline once was Thomas's student in Advanced Poetry 101 [sic].
[Or was she really? There are ambiguities in THE WEIGHT OF WATER.]
Adaline, stretching in and out of her bikini along the boat's long bow, is clearly trying to win a reaction from Thomas, and Boyfriend Rich doesn't seem to mind.
As the film progresses -- as Jane matches evidence with scene, fact with verisimilitude -- she becomes increasingly aware of Adaline's flirtation. She begins to be emotionally fearful for the kids at home, marital years of wear weigh on her, and domestic tensions begin to rise. All the loss and resentment Maren and the other historical figures experienced 125 years before quietly permeate Jean Jane's soul.
Few recent films have so well compared and contrasted the tough scrabble of our recent forebears with the comfortable irrelevance the majority of us live, for a time yet, in the American middle class. Cinematographer Adrian Biddle (ALIENS, THELMA AND LOUISE, THE BUTCHER BOY) catches the essential foreigness to each other of the two periods, with her lighting and choice of distances, yet helps blend the two in emotional experiences shared. Editor Howard E. Smith (RIVERS EDGE, GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS) uses his skills to cut the images of past hopeless drudgery together with the bored anxiety of today. Composer David H. Hirshfelder (ELIZABETH, 1998) lays on themes for a mixture of moods. In between, and at the end, lie equivalent horrors.
Canadian Sarah Polley and the largely Scandenavian cast of Hontvedts and Christensons infiltrate ones memory. [An exception to the Scandenavians is the late and very lamented English actress, Katrin Cartlidge, who from Mike Leigh's NAKED to Von Trier's BREAKING THE WAVES, just tore up the screen -- she will be missed.] Catharine McCormack (BRAVEHEART, 1995) is self-effacing in a role which is largely internal. Sean Penn, one of the premier American actors of our time (when he buckles down to it), effortlessly conveys the laid back guilt of husband who isn't quite sure what he is going to be nailed for. And Liz Hurley, thanks to the troubled history of the film, has laid bye a Christmas present to see her career through some humiliating recent troubles.
THE WEIGHT OF WATER is attempting in its dark way what the frivolous, widely touted POSSESSION utterly failed to accomplish, recently; to convey what it is like to live in two different periods simultaneously. It accomplishes the feat intriguingly, thanks to Director Bigelow, her cast and crew, working from a screenplay by Alice Arlen (SILKWOOD, 1986).
Yet, strangely, this film has been denigrated by many critics, held up without a distributor for two years. Producer Janet Yang told us at the Film Festival in April 2001 that there was large doubt that THE WEIGHT OF WATER would ever be released theatrically.
Absurd!
All's well that ends well, however, as a writer once said, and "America's Smallest Seacoast" can relax: -- http://seacoastNH.com/ -- THE WEIGHT OF WATER, a subject of constant comment there for years, will soon be released, at long last.
It is a first rate psychological horror story, not quite up to -- not so polished, resolved or sensational -- but in the mold of the benchmarks of this genre: THE INNOCENTS (Clayton, 1961) and DON'T LOOK NOW (Roeg, 1973).
Take a chance on it.
Recommended:
Yes
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