All Is Lost: a parable

Robert Redford as nameless man whose boat has just been ruined, hit by a people-less metal container

I think you would all agree that I tried,” he writes [a voice-over] “I will miss you. I’m sorry”

“Fuck! [he shouts in despair]

Dear friends,

It’s hard to know what quite to say about this magnificent feat of a film (directed by J. C. Chandor) as it has few words and the story is so simple (see Denby of the New Yorker). I went with my friend, Vivian, and she suggested it’s too abstract, we are given so little to go on. There is nothing but the words I’ve cited above: was he writing to a family he couldn’t get himself to stay with? So, to parse the parable takes effort and people will inevitably allegorise differently. At one level it obviously dramatizes one person’s will to survive.

So what do we watch? A man alone at sea somewhere in the Indian ocean struggles heroically, tenaciously, miraculously (some of it is improbable) to stay alive and reach people or land before he is drowned by storms, starves to death, or is eaten by fish. Critics have cited Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea and certainly Redford is photographed to make us think of Hemingway’s famous story:

Nonetheless, I suggest this is a Robinson Crusoe story where the man never reaches the island, much less finds a helpful servant (of naturally a “lower” and deferent race of people). Just the opposite: after his boat has become irreparably destroyed and he manages to open a small rubber raft exquisitely set up for human comfort out of a rubber bag — which he manages to salvage from his boat — he passes by two gigantic ships at sea: but he can reach and never sees any people; one ship appears to be nothing but packages, people-less analogously like the metal container that first wrecks his boat; the other might have people as it has lights on top but no one ever responds to his flame-lights (part of the rubber boat’s equipment).

No one can make it alone? Our existences today are perilously separated off from one another? Hard to say as at the close of the film our hero (he is a hero) spies what seems a light from far away. He tries to reach it; having no flame-lights, he actually sets part of a box on fire and it turns his raft into a circle of rubber with fire all about it. So he is now in the ocean with nothing but his skin and soaked clothes. As the thing or light draws near, he wakes from what seems to be a final drowning and swims upward, his eyes all alight. We are to feel that he has seen someone and might now be saved. But we do not know. The movie goes black. Perhaps this is a final pathetic delusion. (This reminded me of the ending of Villette where it’s not clear if M. Paul drowned or reached shore and returned to our heroine.)

As other reviewers have said, Redford delivers a powerful performance. My friend did say she found herself remembering Redford when he was young and much more conventionally handsome; I remembered Out of Africa where he was so beautiful as Denis Hatton-Finch with Meryl Strep his Isak Dinesen and a meal where they drank wine and talked.

In the film at age 77 now to keep our attention he is continuously struggling, even when he sleeps we feel him tenaciously holding on. Every once in a while there is a calm, and there he is with his glasses reading a map, plotting his way to a land he knows, eating, drinking, drying himself off and becoming more comfortable. He has a hat which is improbably dry near the end of the film. Keep the sun out of his eyes. My friend and I felt the technilogical feats were such that we felt we were at sea, hearing the sounds of sea, and then in a storm, watcher sloshing all over, echoing in your eyes, the feel of wind that becomes so loud that it was as if you are there with the hero.

Listen:

It’s not a film for everyone, though it is a sort of bare minimum stunt film (there are stunt substitutes) and action-adventure male film. I did not find it boring, though I drowsed off at first for about 5-10 minutes but when it became intensely a problem of survival and something in Redford gripped me I was with him all the way (a review finding it suspenseful). It’s fair to call it experimental.

Don’t miss it and see what you think it has to say to you about our world today.

Ellen