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Wednesday, July 12th, 2006
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4:53a - Two by Kathryn Bigelow
In the last few days I’ve watched Near Dark (1987) and The Weight of Water (2000), both directed by the underrated Kathryn Bigelow. (I have liked her work ever since I saw Strange Days a decade ago.)
Near Dark is an interesting hybrid: a western with vampires. The main character, Caleb, is first seen wearing a cowboy hat — looking exactly like Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain. The similarity is so striking that I actually paused the DVD to make sure it was not Gyllenhaal. The actor is Adrian Pasdar, who later starred in the Canadian TV series Mysterious Ways, and now seems to have a recurring role in Desperate Housewives. He falls in with a band of “vampires” (the film itself never uses that word), a group of immortal nomads with a quintessentially American flavour: tough, dirty, and sarcastic. They even play poker. I like the style of this film, and I like all the actors, particularly the intriguing and mysterious Jenny Wright. The ending is weak, however.
The structure of The Weight of Water follows two related stories in different time periods, about 125 years apart. Are there a lot of films that do that? It kind of seems like a familiar concept, but the only specific movie I can think of that does it is Possession.
The modern-day story involves four characters. Jean (Catherine McCormack) is a photographer assigned to take some pictures of the scene of an 1873 murder at the Isles of Shoals, in the Atlantic Ocean 10 miles from the coast of New Hampshire. Her husband Thomas (Sean Penn) is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet. The other two are his brother, Rich (Josh Lucas) and Rich’s girlfriend Adaline (Elizabeth Hurley). The four of them, travelling on Rich’s boat, are awash in jealousy and erotic tension. This story is told in chronological order (except possibly for a brief voice-over at the start).
Meanwhile, the 19th-century story is told in nonlinear order. Sarah Polley plays a married Norwegian woman who has just emigrated to America with her husband. Later her sister (Katrin Cartlidge) arrives, and then her brother and his new wife (Vinessa Shaw). But before those characters are introduced, we see the discovery of the two female murder victims and scenes of the trial, and the accused being led to the gallows two years after the trial. Apart from the mystery of the true circumstances of the murders, there is a separate mystery around the Sarah Polley character: why does she seem like such a bitch? And it turns out that jealousy and erotic tension are a major factor here as well. The story is compelling, but I found it annoying that all the Norwegians spoke English to each other, and Norwegian-accented English at that — to the point where I frequently had to turn on the DVD’s subtitles to catch a word. Nevertheless Sarah Polley is amazing in this movie, as are Katrin Cartlidge (who died in 2002) and Vinessa Shaw.
This film is extremely rich and has just the right amount of ambiguity: there are ten main characters and ample room for interpretation of all their interrelationships.
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