I had great hopes for this film.
A bestselling novel, a daunting director and screenwriter, a topnotch cast – what could possibly go wrong? Derek Cianfrance's The Light Between Oceans (2016) had so much potential that was sadly wasted on forced sentimentality.
Lighthouse keeper Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender) and his wife Isabel (Alicia Vikander) find a dead man and a baby in a drifted boat. Having suffered miscarriage twice, Isabel persuades her husband to bury the man and keep the baby to raise as their own. Overwhelmed by his love for his wife, the morally righteous Tom reluctantly accedes; however, four years later, feelings of guilt resurface as he finds out who the real mother of the baby is, and the couple slide into a deadlock dilemma where everyone eventually has to suffer.
The story is great. It has all the elements of a carefully weaved narrative: rounded characters, a moral predicament with an intrinsic human dimension, a gripping plot. What went wrong here is that Cianfrance was so obsessed with eliciting a strong emotional response from his audience that he turned his film into a monotonous melodrama. I do understand how emotionally complicated the question asked by the story is and how deep it delves into the nature of empathy and human guilt, but that doesn't mean shoving this in our face in practically every scene of the two-hour-long movie.
Fassbender was great, and Vikander – despite her childish physique and appearance – is a fierce actress, but I don't think Cianfrance succeeded in exploring the full range of her talent. Both Fassbender's and Vikander's robust performance was pushed to the background and lost to the coerced sentimentality of the picture. My personal favorite part of the entire film is the opening twenty minutes where the relationship between Tom and Isabel develops; it was simple, beautiful and effortlessly powerful.
I honestly have nothing else to say about the film, that's how bland I felt.
Oh Rachel Weisz was in the movie too, just to let you know.
A bestselling novel, a daunting director and screenwriter, a topnotch cast – what could possibly go wrong? Derek Cianfrance's The Light Between Oceans (2016) had so much potential that was sadly wasted on forced sentimentality.
Lighthouse keeper Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender) and his wife Isabel (Alicia Vikander) find a dead man and a baby in a drifted boat. Having suffered miscarriage twice, Isabel persuades her husband to bury the man and keep the baby to raise as their own. Overwhelmed by his love for his wife, the morally righteous Tom reluctantly accedes; however, four years later, feelings of guilt resurface as he finds out who the real mother of the baby is, and the couple slide into a deadlock dilemma where everyone eventually has to suffer.
The story is great. It has all the elements of a carefully weaved narrative: rounded characters, a moral predicament with an intrinsic human dimension, a gripping plot. What went wrong here is that Cianfrance was so obsessed with eliciting a strong emotional response from his audience that he turned his film into a monotonous melodrama. I do understand how emotionally complicated the question asked by the story is and how deep it delves into the nature of empathy and human guilt, but that doesn't mean shoving this in our face in practically every scene of the two-hour-long movie.
Fassbender was great, and Vikander – despite her childish physique and appearance – is a fierce actress, but I don't think Cianfrance succeeded in exploring the full range of her talent. Both Fassbender's and Vikander's robust performance was pushed to the background and lost to the coerced sentimentality of the picture. My personal favorite part of the entire film is the opening twenty minutes where the relationship between Tom and Isabel develops; it was simple, beautiful and effortlessly powerful.
I honestly have nothing else to say about the film, that's how bland I felt.
Oh Rachel Weisz was in the movie too, just to let you know.