All is Lost

 All is Lost (2013) is an austere, minimalist survival picture.  Although it stars screen icon, Robert Redford, the film is a rigorous exercise that has an experimental aspect -- it has more in common with Robert Bresson than with a conventional Hollywood adventure movie.  The script, said to be only 32 pages long, explores a fatal accident at sea, without offering viewers any back-story, any dialogue, and any escape from the raw events depicted into "significance"; the movie bears no trace of allegory or symbolism.  The plight of the lone mariner is displayed with close attention to detail and there's no larger meaning to anything that we behold.  It seems that the movie must have been physically daunting to film; the movie is almost as exhausting to watch as it must have been to make.

Redford's character is called "Our Man" -- at least, this is how he is designated in the credits.  This unnamed man is piloting a large sailboat through the Pacific when he runs into deadly trouble.  We see him aroused from where he is sleeping on a couch under the deck -- a waterfall is pouring through a breach in the side of the sailboat.  The Man finds that he has run aground (presumably while sleeping) on a large, floating storage container.  The sharp corner of the freightcar-sized container has ripped open the side of his sailboat and flooded the living quarters.  The man is alone.  We never learn his name or where he is going or why he is piloting the big sailboat across the Pacific Ocean.  We are privy to a voice-over representing an apologetic last message that the Man puts in a mason jar -- but we don't know to whom "our Man" is apologizing.  Although,  the Man repairs the breach in boat's hull, he encounters a terrible storm.  The sail boat's masts are shattered and the vessel itself rolls over and over in the tremendous high seas.  The Man hits his head on a pipe and rips open his forehead. (Previously, he's fallen off the deck although latched to the ship by a cable and gets keel-hauled.)  Ultimately, the sailboat sinks and the Man has to abandon it for an inflatable life raft.  There's another squall and the life raft gets toppled over, rolling on the high seas.  The Man discovers that his water supply is contaminated with sea water and no longer potable.  (This calamity triggers one of the man's rare outbursts -- mostly, he is stoic and without expression during his travails.)  He has no food remaining and drifts helplessly across the ocean.  On one occasion when he catches a couple fish on his line, a shark lunges forward and seizes the fish, almost ripping them from the Man's hands.  The raft floats across a shipping lane and two huge container ships come within a few hundred yards of the shipwreck.  But despite our Man's efforts, the vast ships which dwarf the pinpoint of his raft pay him no heed.  At last, the man sees a small vessel approaching, lights a fire with his last matches on the raft -- the raft burns up and the man plunges into the sea, too exhausted and debilitated to even swim. As he sinks to the bottom of the ocean, he sees a light above and, perhaps, is saved.  (It's equally possible that this final vision is a flare in his dying brain and that, as in Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, the man has merely fantasized his salvation.)

All of this is dispassionately presented.  There's some minimalist music but no commentary.  The man cries out a couple of times but, except for dictating his message in bottle (which he does in peculiarly stilted and uncommunicative way -- probably due to inanition), Redford's character never speaks.  With the exception of a couple high-angle shots and some underwater images from below the raft showing schools of fish and sharks, the camera never strays from Redford or from his perspective.  The movie eschews spectacle.  The sea is either a mirror -lat expanse or turbulent with big waves but there are no memorable shots of the ocean or its weather.  (An exception is a single shot showing the sun as a blob of molten metal sinking into the sea at sunset.)  Our Man isn't particularly heroic and, certainly, doesn't engage in any derring do.  At one point, he ascends a mast and has to rappel down as swiftly as possible because of an advancing storm -- he seems barely capable of the feats required of him by the desperate plight in which he finds himself.  For some reason, he has no reliable radio, no back-up electronics or communication, no real ingenuity nor, even, much in the way of maritime competence.  In order to reckon where he is located, he has to carefully read the instructions on a sextant in a box -- he clearly doesn't really know how to use the sextant and charting his position, in any event, is meaningless:  the raft is drifting on the open sea and he can't control where it goes.  There is nothing visionary in the movie -- no dream sequences nor fantasies until, perhaps, the last shot.  Redford, like all the greatest movie actors, doesn't seem to be doing anything at all -- he scarcely raises an eyebrow during the entire film.  The camera simply studies his aging, handsome features as he, in turn, looks at things with a patient, appraising eye -- there's one thirty second outburst but Redford is conspicuously stoic throughout the rest of the film.  (Obviously, the part is extremely demanding physically and I was impressed with Redford's willingness to clamber up and down ladders and rigging in soaking wet clothing.)  The director N. K. Chandor has made what David Bordwell used to call a "parametric film" -- that is, an avant garde picture strictly defined by the parameters of location and the camera's insistence on focusing exclusively on the leading (and only) character and his point of view.  I don't like pictures of this sort -- they seem pointless to me.  But Chandor and Redford must be granted the courage of their convictions -- they don't dramatize anything since it's their faith that the dire situation is intrinsically dramatic without any false histrionics or spectacle.  In this film, a great tempest at sea is rendered as a man being flung about helplessly in a claustrophobic cabin; he gets rumpled like clothing in a dryer.