Taken by the waves

To be truly alone, to prepare, travel, hurl oneself into prolonged isolation: we can reduce this to some stoic, masculine, perhaps inherently literary ideal—books, after all, are a way of being alone, while movies have traditionally brought people together—but there is something universal, even spiritual, in the pursuit of solitude. Somewhere, somehow, the protagonist of J.C. Chandor’s All is Lost resolved himself to such a pursuit. We meet him on a yacht in the Indian Ocean. He’s old but very fit, handsome, almost certainly affluent, clearly a skilled sailor. He exudes discipline. We might envy or admire his ability to fulfill his resolution to be alone. But solitude can come with a chilling price. The man’s punishment for trying to get away from the world might be to be banished from it forever, to die alone, unable to ask for consolation, much less help. A drifting shipping container has pierced his yacht’s hull. He wakes to find the cabin flooded, the onboard electrical system malfunctioning. He does not show panic—is panic something we only show when there’s someone to show it to? He doesn’t talk to himself. He takes care of business, scaling the mast, patching the hole, trying to repair the radio. Days pass. At one point he shaves—perhaps it helps to retain habits in a crisis. Is the man doomed, as the title implies? He’s played by Robert Redford, giving his most compelling performance, a one-man show, all action, no talk. But just because he’s Robert Redford doesn’t mean we get a happy ending. And All is Lost isn’t about endings. It’s a film of moments, each heightened by the knowledge that it could be the last.

I found Chandor’s debut, the corporate drama Margin Call, a little overrated, maybe because we were so hungry for a movie to talk about the financial crisis. But All is Lost, the antithesis of Margin Call in many regards, is extraordinary, a cinematic stunt, but one that’s captivating and teeming with unspoken meaning—save a brief opening voice-over, a curse, and a few garbled fragments transmitted on the dying radio, there is no dialogue. (An instructive to the makers of Gravity: you actually can tell an engaging story of survival without having to cram every scene with chatter.) What is the man’s name? What was his career? Does he have a family? Did he abandon them? Or they him? What brought him here? The questions are richer than any answers could be. In lieu of answers we watch, listen, and very quickly begin to find ourselves in that sinking ship. (One interesting link to Margin Call: the guilty shipping container is leaking shoes, an exceedingly subtle commentary on global economics. The affluent American is imperiled by a container carrying goods produced in developing countries by underpaid workers so as to better line the pockets of affluent Americans.)

Chandor sticks close to his man, even during sequences in which most directors would be tempted to cut away. The yacht does summersaults during a nocturnal tempest, and Chandor smartly films the entire sequence from inside the cabin, a small world turning upside-down. An image of Redford asleep in his hammock above the flooded cabin, personal items afloat in the soup, recalls Tarkovsky. As the film progresses, there are occasional shots of life below the surface—the world that threatens to consume the man. Alex Ebert’s score stays mostly level with the environmental sounds, only rarely surfacing to heighten mood when things get especially dire. I can’t say enough about the rare degree of rigour applied to this more or less mainstream movie. All is Lost prizes a truly immersive cinematic experience over cozy tropes. It asks only for the sort of attention one might apply to one’s own solitude. 

         

Signals of wonder, despair and genius in Tree of Smoke

Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $31) begins with a pair of deaths, one being that of a US president, the other a monkey somewhere deep in the perspiring tangle of Filipino jungle. It is somehow indicative of the peculiar and complex moral concerns of this novel that the monkey’s demise is the more affecting. As is the fact that both of these deaths are assassinations by rifle, executed by American boys with American military training, boys caught up in some scheme far greater than they’re capable of comprehending.

Denis Johnson’s new novel, the most deserving winner of the National Book Award, is sprawling, ambitious, at times delirious, as labyrinthine as the Southeast Asian jungles it regularly returns to. It is a messy, profound and vehemently imperfect sort of masterpiece that attempts to grapple with the Vietnam War, the whole damned thing, in one monolithic block of text, arguably making it akin to Don DeLillo’s Underworld, which selected The Cold War as its one massive historical essence to conjure, and grapple with. It is as huge and demanding in every way as Johnson’s previously most famous novel Jesus’ Son (1992) was intimate, oneiric and diminutive. It’s the sort of novel that generates incredible excitement, and will likely come to be resented by readers who prefer their Emperors naked, and reduce Johnson’s brick of prose to an unruly, disorganized and inordinately defiant stunt. Me? I was enthralled.

Though it’s tricky to pin down a single protagonist in Tree of Smoke, I guess it must be Skip Sands, an idealistic young man from Kansas developing a career in intelligence. Yet in reading the book I became so attached to the Houston brothers, two shaggily likable guys –one of whom was first seen in Johnson’s Angels (1983)– whisked from a most arid Arizona and dropped into alien fields of blood, chaos, decay, cheap beer and prostitutes. There’s also an aid worker from Winnipeg, and a couple of Vietnamese military men who charge Johnson’s grand wash of a narrative with palpable feeling, personality and much humour as it rattles its way from 1963 all the way to 1983.

On display here are many of the idiosyncratic rhetorical jewels that have made Johnson’s voice such a witty, memorable one. He writes terrific dialogue in broken English, a skill that gives a special potency and pointed humour to moments of despair. There are countless character descriptions like this one: “He was both barrel-chested and pot-bellied, also bowlegged, also sunburned… He wore a silver flattop haircut on a head like an anvil.” Yet there are also passages of character development deftly handled through ribald, well-chosen juxtaposition: “Skip was afraid of women. The pork chops came, succulent, moist.” And there is the constant undercurrent of rationalizations for the imposition of force and ideology, and the hows and whys of the US in Vietnam: “The land is their myth. We penetrate the land, we penetrate their national soul.”

Considering the many correlations to be made between the US-led war addressed in Tree of Smoke and the one going on today in Iraq, it might be useful to boil it all down to one of Johnson’s pet themes, the power of karma. Karma mounts like a terrible, out of control mass, feeding on brutality, delusion and betrayal, as the novel lurches toward its devastating finale. But karma is also considered eloquently right in the opening pages, following that seemingly incidental slaying of a monkey: “He had expected to be made to see it again; so he was relieved to be walking back to the club without having to look at what he’d done. Yet he understood, without much alarm or unease, that he wouldn’t be spared this sight forever.”

(This review originally appeared in The Edmonton Journal.)