Review: The Light Between Oceans

Derek Cianfrance's The Light Between Oceans is something of an epic, operating on quite a small scale but still putting its characters through some formidable challenges. It's based on TL Stedman's novel of the same name, one that suggests both intimacy and profundity. This story does eventually deliver on both, but in the film at least, the intimacy is there pretty much from the get-go. It sets itself up to be a charming love story about a mild-mannered lighthouse keeper (Michael Fassbender) and his lovely wife (Alicia Vikander) who live on the Island of January between two oceans. It is December, 1918. Tom Sherbourne was a lucky survivor of the Great War, though with no loving family to come home to and no reason to believe that he has any right to be alive after so many have died. As he is first getting to know the sweet young Isabel Haysmark, he tells her he has done some unspeakable things in the years he spent on the front, though he doesn’t go into any detail. For him, the noble occupation of a lighthouse keeper is a way to give something good to the world, to help others when they most need it, but to do so from afar, without having to look into their eyes and receive undeserved gratitude. He never envisioned sharing this new life with a wife and child, but almost immediately after she meets him, Isabel is determined to court him, marry him and give him a family. She manages the first two of those easily enough, but after two miscarriages that final dream of hers is looking unlikely to come true.

Cianfrance doesn't spend too long on their burgeoning romance. He mostly just shows them sharing their different experiences of the war. Isabel lost all three of her brothers, and is now an only child. She notices how, unlike a wife who might tragically become a widow after the war, there is no special name for what a parent becomes if they lose their children, or for what a sister becomes if she loses her brothers. To her, it is a connection that cannot be severed, the kind of love that never dies, even if the person it was for is now dead, or never even had a chance at life.

Conversations like this one are peppered throughout the film, particularly in the initial stages of the plot. This is one of the more well-written deep and meaningful dialogues to be seen here. Others are markedly more on-the-nose, such as Tom explaining all of the mythological symbolism of the island, or one that has a certain crucial supporting character reciting one of the morals of the story: “You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day.”

These are all very worthy, weighty sentiments, but some of them are gratingly overstated and seem to arrive just in time for some not-so-subtle foreshadowing.

Unsurprisingly, the film is at its most effective when it communicates its ideas through sounds and images - especially one striking shot that makes the ocean feel just like a desert - and when it simply trusts the strength of its story. After a generous amount of romantic and tragic setup, the real story is carried over the waves towards the little island with those two tiny graves. The couple spot a dinghy drifting near the shoreline, with a dead man and a crying baby girl lying inside it. Isabel is desperate to keep her. For all they know, she has no one. If Tom puts this in the log book, she'll probably be sent to an orphanage. Isabel convinces him to pretend that she's theirs, to Christen her Lucy Sherbourne and literally raise her as their own, an apparently victimless crime that might just rescue all three of them.

Years later, however, when Tom discovers there that there is indeed a victim still suffering from what they did to her, he fears that they have damned themselves to a lifetime of punishment. It turns out that the dead man in the boat, the girl’s biological father, was a German man named Frank Roennfeldt (Leon Ford), the one who later espouses the virtues of forgiveness in a romantic flashback. Unfortunately, his new overseas neighbours weren’t quite as willing to bury the hatchet so soon after the war. He got into that boat out of blind fear for his own life, and even more so the life of his tiny daughter, who he had named Grace. Meanwhile, his wife, Hannah (Rachel Weisz) was left behind to erect a tombstone for both of them on the mainland of Australia.

Strangely enough, that is where the film is set, even though its three main actors are Irish, English and Swedish and use more or less English accents. Cianfrance has tried to create a believable sense of place by shooting some of the scenes in Tasmania and filling the supporting cast with well-known Australian actors like Jack Thompson and Bryan Brown, who all act in their native accents. It’s a pretty discordant mix, but it still amounts to some very evocative cinematography and many solid performances. Unsurprisingly, Fassbender imbues the world-weary war survivor with a genuine sense of humanity, Vikander brings an unexpected dark streak to the loving mother with no child to love, while Weisz is consistently engaging as the wounded wildcard who stirs things up to an exceptional level of moral complexity.

There are an awful lot of films that start with an excitingly unique premise that then just tapers off into cliché, but, interestingly, The Light Between Oceans begins in a fairly predictable way and becomes more interesting and sure-footed as it goes along.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas.

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