"Stormy
Weather – The Weight of Water Takes Marriage to the Deep
End"
(Note: I originally saw
“The Weight of Water” at the
2001 Seattle
International Film Festival. It had two screenings and the film
intrigued me enough to convince me to attend both. The following
is a review I wrote after the second screening. It should also
be noted, that the great Katrin Cartlidge, unmentioned in this
review, gives one of her final performances here, and is
heartbreakingly brilliant.)
Katherine
Bigelow has intrigued me for quite some time. Both Near Dark
and Strange Days continue to haunt and stimulate my
thinking in various ways, and I regard both as under-appreciated
classics of a real talent working near the top of her game. Even
muddled misfires like Point Break and Blue Steel
have their moments of ethereal brilliance, so much so that every
time the talented auteur steps behind a camera it is hard not to
get just a little bit excited.
So what to
make of her latest, the strange and surreal The Weight of
Water? I’m not entirely sure. On one hand, the film is an
elegantly crafted character study of loveless desperation. On
quite another, it is a historical look at male dominance and
feminine submission. It doesn’t reach any startling conclusions
in regards to either subject, but is made with such excellent
precision it is never less than absorbing. That this tale is
told in two intertwining strands weaving past and present, yet
each reaching similar outcomes of corrupting devastation, is all
part of the mind-twisting game that Bigelow wants to play.
Photojournalist Jean (Catherine McCormack of Shadow of the Vampire,
giving one of her most assured performances) heads to a small
island of the coast of New Hampshire to document pictorially the
landscape where a double-murder occurred in 1873. Joining is her
brother-in-law Rich (Josh Lucas,
The Deep End), upon whose boat she is traveling, his
sexpot girlfriend Adaline (Elizabeth Hurley, finally finding a
role that suits her) and her estranged husband Thomas (Sean
Penn, in full-blown brood mode), an author with a profound case
of writer’s block.
Jean and
Thomas’ marriage is hurting. And, as only artists seem to be
able to in movies, they simmer and brood and slow burn
themselves to oblivion before raising their voices in
confrontation. Yet, when things pop, you just know they are
going to stew over way past boiling, especially with Adaline
lying around the boat topless or staring come-hitherly in the
direction of the hapless husband while sucking on Popsicles
seductively.
But those
distractions are nothing compared to the hardships endured by
Maren Hontvedt (Sarah Polley, Go) back in 1873. Not only
is she figuratively trapped in a loveless marriage with the
gruff and over-bearing John (Ulrich Thomsen, the villain Davidov
from The World Is Not Enough), she’s also literally
trapped on the island itself, a rock of a home constantly facing
the cold ocean. She harbors secrets, though, that gradually
reveal themselves. When they do, they not only shatter her
world, but those of those around her.
Those
revelations, long shrouded in mystery, will have profound
consequences for Jean and her shipmates. Maren’s struggles with
feminine and masculine roles and ideals clash and mingle with
her own, proving that as much as things have changed in 130
years, the state of man and wife still grounds itself in all-too
familiar terrain.
Water
is a muddle and rolls in and out of itself so many times that
it’s easy to get confused and distracted by the overarching
storylines. And the conclusions reached in Alice Arlen and
Christopher Kyle’s screenplay, adapted from the novel by Anita
Shreve, are dubious to say the least. But Bigelow creates such
an intoxicating swell it is hard to not get drawn in to the
whole convoluted mess these era-spanning characters find
themselves in.
Helped
immensely by the great Adrian Biddle’s (Aliens, Thelma
& Louise) camerawork, David Hirschfelder’s (Shine)
masterful score and Howard E. Smith’s (Point Break)
crackerjack editing, the director weaves in and out of the
different eras seamlessly. Time-lapse skies help illuminate the
different time frames and turmoil bubbling beneath each woman’s
surface, and alternating film stock illuminate the truth behind
the murders driving the plot.
Hard to
pinpoint and even harder to really get a handle on, The
Weight of Water is more cinematic experimentation than
anything else. As such, it mesmerizes. It is only when you start
to look below the surface that you realize that the points it
ultimately makes are far shallower than the work it took to
flesh them out. Sometimes, though, just this sort of
experimentation is more than enough to forgive a soggy outcome.
