All is Lost (J.C. Chandor, 2013)

[Jeff]

Some of the best reviews I've seen come out of Cannes have been for J.C. Chandor's All is Lost, which screened out of competition. It's a nearly dialogue-free survival drama with Robert Redford as the only cast member. More than one review has suggested that it's the pinnacle of Redford's acting career.

[Professor Wagstaff]

Great news that Chandor has another winner under his belt, especially one that's wildly different from his first film, though it does make me lament that the Coen Brothers never got their own minimal dialogue survivalist story To the White Sea made.

[warren oates]

Some of the best reviews I've seen come out of the festival have been for J.C. Chandor's All is Lost, which screened out of competition. It's a nearly dialogue-free survival drama with Robert Redford as the only cast member. More than one review has suggested that it's the pinnacle of Redford's acting career.

Can't wait to see this one that I'd never heard of until today. Love that it's so different from the underrated talky thriller that was his first feature. All is Lost sounds like it's got exactly the right idea of how to tell a solo survival story in the cinema -- minimal, sans dialogue or voice-over, and never once cutting away from the immediacy of the life and death situation at hand. In other words: everything 127 Hours got wrong.

[knives]

127 Hours was a pretty good film. It just aimed for a different use of this sort of story than Chandor seems to be doing.

[Jeff]

Here's a clip and the logline:

Deep into a solo voyage in the Indian Ocean, an unnamed man wakes to find his 39-foot yacht taking on water after a collision with a shipping container left floating on the high seas. With his navigation equipment and radio disabled, the man sails unknowingly into the path of a violent storm. Despite his success in patching the breached hull, his mariner’s intuition and a strength that belies his age, the man barely survives the tempest.
Using only a sextant and nautical maps to chart his progress, he is forced to rely on ocean currents to carry him into a shipping lane in hopes of hailing a passing vessel. But with the sun unrelenting, sharks circling and his meager supplies dwindling, the ever-resourceful sailor soon finds himself staring his mortality in the face.

And some snippets from early reviews...

Justin Chang, Variety:

As close to pure existential cinema as American filmmaking is likely to get these days, “All Is Lost” finds writer-director J.C. Chandor decisively avoiding the sophomore slump with a picture that could scarcely be more different from his 2011 debut, “Margin Call.” An impressively spare, nearly dialogue-free stranded-at-sea drama that strips characterization down to basic survival instinct...“All Is Lost,” then, is that mainstream-movie rarity: a virtually wordless film that speaks with grave eloquence and simplicity about the human condition. Nothing here feels fancy or extraneous, least of all Redford’s superb performance...

Todd McCarthy, The Hollywood Reporter:

Redford’s exceptional performance will serve as the primary commercial calling card for Lionsgate upon October release. The Old Man and the Sea certainly represents a template for this straightforward, intensely focused tale of a man battling the elements, although Chandor has stripped his drama of any extra baggage, be it allegorical, metaphorical or spiritual. It is what it is, just about a man exercising his skill and limited options in the face of happenstance, bad luck and whatever nature decides to throw at him. Which is plenty.

Eric Kohn, IndieWire

Chandor leaves plenty of time in his patient narrative to let the big ideas sink in.

Nevertheless, even as "All Is Lost" expands Chandor's range with a far more engaging and determined work, the true auteur of "All Is Lost" is Redford himself. As the camera hovers inches from his iconic blue eyes, the actor takes hold of the material and infuses it with a mortality that demands no explanatory dialogue. Getting close to the actor and watching him work, Redford delivers something we've never seen him do before by boiling down the essence of his career into a cavalcade of frantic looks.

Mike D'Angelo, The A.V. Club:

Margin Call showed off Chandor’s talent for snappy dialogue, but here he succeeds in paring the struggle to its purely visual essence, allowing Redford the freedom to literally let action define character. It’s hard to say if this is a great performance—arguably, it’s too single-minded to achieve greatness—but it’s precisely what the movie requires, and Redford commits himself wholeheartedly to the Mamet-approved technique of performing each necessary action as simply and directly as possible.

[flyonthewall2983]

Trailer

[Professor Wagstaff]

This is the third trailer this week to feature minimal dialogue (after "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" and "American Hustle", though this time for obvious reasons), and is the best of the bunch. Cannot wait.

[flyonthewall2983]

I wouldn't be too surprised if the trailer contained most of the dialogue in the film.

[criterion10]

I'm surprised there isn't much discussion about this film on here, although I'm sure the film's limited release hasn't helped that issue. I saw this earlier today and thought it was great, easily among the year's best films. It seems as though it's been overshadowed by other films this year, which is a shame as I feel it's a very important film.

Redford gives a great performance, and I hope he receives some awards attention. But, in addition to that, I was also very impressed by the cinematography and the minimalist score, both of which really added a lot to the film.

I read an article somewhere online that compared this film with Gravity, as both films are basically survival stories at their core. The two films would make for an interesting double-header, to see how the differences and similarities in how both directors chose to tell their story.

There are some discussion points I'd like to talk about in regards to the ending, though I'll wait until more have seen the film before bringing them up.

[Jeff]

All is Lost has a lot going for it, but the best thing about it is Redford's straightforward, understated performance. With no backstory and thus no real actorly "motivation" (stay alive!), he commands the screen in such a quietly authoritative way. I've never identified with the desire some men have to separate from society to be alone and one with nature, but I identified with Our Man here. Redford's weathered, contemplative face does all the work dealing with a range of emotions and decisions. Here is a man defined by his opacity, who thankfully doesn't mutter about ideas, or curse his predicament (okay, once, powerfully), or mourn for lost love. He thinks, rests, acts. It's a quiet tour de force.

The film's crisis-resolution-repeat cycle can be exhausting, but Redford's deliberate and convincing approach to performing each task makes it all very gripping. The fact that the film sets up the idea that anything can and will probably go wrong makes the ending uncertain, even up to the final seconds.

There are some great shots here, though I thought one of the final ones, while beautiful, was reaching for a sort of spirituality that the film had otherwise avoided. I also found the score very intrusive and cloyingly sentimental in parts, undermining the action and prodding at emotions that were being intentionally underplayed. While the sole performance is a lean one, I think the film itself would have benefited from cutting 20 minutes from its midsection. For me this sort of story needs constant propulsion and it starts to fizzle in a second act that feels somewhat repetitive. It is indeed a great companion piece to Gravity. Both skillfully made survival tales are worthwhile. They get different things right. If you could combine Cuarón and Lubezki's pacing, vision, and style with Chandor and Redford's straightforward efficient character work, you'd really have something!

[warren oates]

Forget about Gravity, good as it is. Here's the real deal survival thriller of the year. In fact, All Is Lost may be the best film of its type (disaster/survival) I've ever seen.

There's almost no dialogue, zero backstory and just one character. This is one of the purest action films yet made, giving you even less than Bresson would. Rigorously minimal and relentlessly procedural, the film follows a character without a name (listed in the credits only as "Our Man"), as he deals rather straightforwardly with a cascading series of imminent threats to his boat. He never panics, and he never gives up, but instead pushes ahead relentlessly trying to solve the next most pressing problem of his survival with whatever tools he has at hand, often improvising ingenuously.

This film actually isn't afraid to trust the audience, to give us interesting actions to watch and to believe that we'll follow closely and care even if we don't understand it all right away. There are plenty of things Redford does that are immediately clear even to non-sailors, but others that take a while to understand fully. It's a measure of how good the film is -- how precise the writing and visual storytelling are -- that we never feel lost.

The script's most clever conceit is

Spoiler

to have the boat damaged, then repaired, then damaged again beyond repair, so that it's taking on water and sinking slowly, one way or another, for about half the film, and that Redford stays on it and has plenty to do -- and at first a reasonable hope he'll succeed. I've read true accounts of solo sailors who've run into similar trouble and they are much more likely to have been forced to abandoned ship with only a few moments' notice. But it would have been boring to spend the whole run time in the lifeboat with one guy (especially with no tiger to talk to). And the film is so good at selling us the plausible reality of that initial hole in the hull -- just bad enough to cause extensive flooding, just big enough to require some iffy patching, just high enough above the water line in calm seas with the boat running straight that it could hold together.

I won't go quite as far as Jeff about the score. For me the music is fine for what it is, but I'm not sure the film needs as much music as it has or any at all.

The performance is quite good, but there are a few moments -- like the "F**k!" scream -- where I wished the director had done another take. Or enough takes to exhaust and piss off Redford to the point where some real despair showed through.

Spoiler

A favorite moment of mine comes when he's in the life raft and he's opening the box with what we'll see is the sextant. There's a card in there, as it was clearly a gift from his family. He almost looks at the card but thinks better of it. That ambivalence, the way in which he can't bear to be so intimately reminded of his loved ones at that moment, is more effective to me than his message in a bottle v.o. that opens the film.

The film could be 10-15 minutes shorter and maybe also be a little more careful near the end to not fall into a rut, to keep every next situation feeling worse than the one before instead of just one bad thing after another

Spoiler

(though this monotony is, of course, part of the reality of what being adrift on a life raft must feel like).

I also wish that desperate final gambit of Redford's hadn't precipitated the precise ending it does. It's simultaneously arty ambiguous and over the top in a way that doesn't suit the rest of the film.

Spoiler

Redford doesn't have good enough reasons to be sinking/drowning at that point. He ought to still be high on the adrenaline burst that inspired his last chance raft signal fire. And the imagery gets a little too metaphorical and too Hollywood for me.

Questions for any experienced sailors out there:

Spoiler

Would that patch really have held? Are fiberglass repair kits actually that robust? Even in that storm? Speaking of which, when the boat rolls over, why doesn't the sea just come rushing in that main deck hatch straight away? And are those scenes of Redford going unnoticed lighting flares in the shipping lanes accurate? Why doesn't someone with a boat as well appointed as Redford have at least one waterproof back-up emergency radio or GPS beacon? Don't life rafts as nice as the one he has come with that stuff nowadays?

Any of my above concerns are just quibbles that I only took the time to list because the whole of the film is so good I wished it were just that much better. Very few filmmakers produce second features this strong. Fewer still ones that are so different in every respect from their debuts. A double feature of Margin Call and All Is Lost should be enough to convince any producer that J.C. Chandor can probably handle just about any filmmaking challenge he takes on. And I'll certainly be there for whatever comes next.

[Keyrek]

I also found the score very intrusive and cloyingly sentimental in parts, undermining the action and prodding at emotions that were being intentionally underplayed.

I think there was a bit of a joke in the scene where

Spoiler

Our Man spots the first freighter and the score swells & continues swelling until it completely bypasses him, at which point the music fades into a thud. That moment seemed more like the score messing with audience expectations rather than underlining & keying into them.

[mfunk9786]

I didn't like this very much, and I think the reason why after thinking about it for a few days is because the protagonist is so calm. Where are the stakes when the lead (and only character) in your film never seems tremendously bothered by his predicament? Even when things get incredibly grim, Our Man makes some very difficult decisions with a straight, heroic face. What's so cinematic about a character who doesn't speak and seems to have resigned himself to the worst possible fate right from the beginning? I think that Chandor had a good idea here, but pushed it too far in a minimalist direction in the wrong areas - cut the cheesy music, give Redford something to live for, and then we'd have ourselves a movie!

[warren oates]

Just because he doesn't panic, doesn't mean he's not bothered by his circumstances or that he's somehow supremely unbothered. I think you're mistaking Our Man's base level competence and grit for a kind of breezy nonchalance that couldn't be further from his character. The sort of guy who sets out to solo sail around the world in the first place isn't going to be one to give in or throw up his hands or cry so easily. Because, first of all, he's got the kind of skill set and mindset that allow him to weather the ordinary challenges of such a journey every day alone for months. So when bigger challenges start stacking up and shift into the realm of the extraordinary, he doesn't lose his cool -- he's constantly and actively trying to solve his problem(s). And I, for one, found that immensely likable and compelling. Our Man is hardly resigned and not at all the picture of generic movie hero stoicism you're suggesting. As with Fontaine in Bresson's A Man Escaped, he's simply and doggedly determined to get out of this life-threatening predicament, even if he has no idea how.

And make no mistake, he is severely tested from the beginning, in spite of his impressive skills.

Spoiler

He might know how to patch a hull hole in theory, but he's clearly never done one this large. Same with the bilge pump, which he's never operated by hand before. And the sextant, which he's never used, period. These are just a few examples of the way the film continually presents its highly skilled and brave protagonist with challenges that he's not necessarily up to, so that he's constantly forced to improvise in order to survive. And it doesn't always work out: He's unable to repair his radio or the radio antenna. He overlooks a small air vent in his potable water supply container, inadvertently contaminating it with sea water when his raft capsizes. He's not simply reacting to disaster and handily overcoming every next horrible thing.

About the stakes and his motivation: Our Man surely has his own life to live for -- one that can't be all that bad if he's accomplished enough to be enjoying a solo sailboat trip around the world when most other guys his age would be settling for a package cruise to the Caribbean. And I'd certainly dispute the fact that a viable survival story protagonist needs anything more than that. No backstory necessary. Yet he also reaches out to his loved ones in the opening flashforward message-in-a-bottle voiceover. And there's another tiny moment later that speaks volumes about his friends/family, even if it does so mysteriously and minimally.

Spoiler

He finds a card in the box with the sextant, but he can't bring himself to read it or even remove it from the envelope. He knows enough about himself to understand that he shouldn't be making himself so vulnerable at that moment, because too much of the wrong kind of hope and sentiment right then could be deadly.

[warren oates]

Blu-ray announced and detailed.

[dustybooks]

This was really harrowing, and a strong piece of cinematic (and purely visual) storytelling. I quite liked

Spoiler

the impossibility of determining whether the last moments were literal or allegorical. Either way, it's a strong ending, but I think the bravest conclusion would be to fade out on that sunset a few minutes earlier. We'd just be denied the wonderfully disorienting underwater shots of the burning raft.

I would place this as basically equal to Gravity. I think the characterization in both films is stronger than some have reported, at least for my purposes. We see

Spoiler

Redford's wedding ring, see the greeting card reaction that warren oates mentioned above, and know enough to discern that he is a loner doing something he loves -- which I think makes this more powerful than, say, the Alien construct of a crew on a commercial vessel. That's surprisingly enough to drive our empathy toward him, and the feeling that we are participating along with him in this journey. Despite the clunkier dialogue and more on-the-nose back story, I felt the same way about Sandra Bullock in Gravity.

Now I'll have to go back and see Margin Call finally.

[warren oates]

Heard a BBC interview with Redford yesterday. Apparently, the first he heard of the project was a script sent from his agent that was around 30 pages long. Guess those conventional dialogue chatty chat scenes sure do beef up a page count.

[FerdinandGriffon]

I liked and respected the premise and really wanted this to be a pure action movie, with physics itself as the main antagonist, but as the movie progressed I couldn't rid myself of the feeling that "our man" was struggling more with the filmmakers and the poor decisions they were putting into his head than with the sea or his boat. Besides that I didn't think much of the camerawork and editing, and hated the pseudo-religious ending, but the real bugbear was the air of unreality and lack of consequence that I felt because of certain seeming manipulations in the narrative and character actions. Now usually, I'd just trust my gut/my own logic, but here I was a little out of my depth, with only a tiny bit of sailing experience under my belt. An uncle is a big sailor though, who's crewed on several transatlantic and transpacific trips, and I was very curious to hear what he thought of the film. He sent me the following email last night:

Spoiler

All is lost (Should be called, “All is Bull Shit”)
I found this movie incredibly frustrating. So much of the movie was SO unrealistic for offshore conditions and so many of the actions that Robert Redford took were NOT what anyone that had gotten as far as the Indian Ocean would have done.
Generally, if this movie was accurate there would be no adventure and no need to make the movie. A hole above the water line in a fiberglass boat that is in calm conditions does not need to be a crisis situation. In the movie Robert Redford had enough fiberglass and resin to make an adequate repair.
A hole a few inches in diameter can put a boat on the bottom in a few minutes. There is no way any captain would have done anything other than address that hole first. With the tools on hand he could have made an adequate repair that could have carried him on safely until he was able to get to a proper repair yard.
Once the hole is repaired no sailor would have bothered with the tiny hand pump. There is no more efficient bilge pump than a scared sailor and a 5 gallon bucket.
Even if the batteries did get swamped it is very doubtful they would have been ruined. They would just be dead – no juice. Any cruising sailboat in the Indian Ocean would have had solar panels and possibly a wind generator that could be used to recharge the batteries.
Electronics: Where to start?!
A boat sailing forward would have struck the container in the bow or forward quarter, not at the Nav station where the electronics were.
In the movie much is made of trying to get the VHF radio working. This radio has a range of approximately 30 miles (with his mast mounted antennae plugged in). With the vastness of the Indian Ocean the chances of contacting another boat within 30 miles is next to none.
Where VHF radios are useful is hailing ships as they pass by. Having a VHF in the life raft would also have negated much of this movie. The electronics at the nav station would generally not be waterproof, but there would be a second set in the cockpit that would be water proof. There would also be handheld backups that would be water proof or in a water proof container. These would have their own battery sources. Anyone in the Indian Ocean that had the way with all to have a life raft would have a ditch bag with emergency supplies including a waterproof, handheld VHF and a GPS.
99% of cruising boats sailing across the Indian Ocean that had the money for a life raft would also have an EPIRB. An EPIRB sends out a distress signal in the case of a sinking. Most cruising boats in the Indian Ocean have single sideband, high frequency radios (SSB) that could also be used to send a mayday even far out at sea. Many boats these days also have satellite communications as well.
There were so many fallacies in the movie! To name a few more:
No need to sleep in a hammock above a flooded boat. An uninjured sailor even one that is on in his years can bail out a 36 foot sailboat in a few hours. After stopping the water from entering the boat that would have been the next priority.
He was taking in an out his cockpit hatch-boards all thru the movie. They would never have been removed in such rough weather. He would also have had his safety harness and tether on in rough weather (not just going forward).
During the first storm he went forward to put up his storm sail. It was way too late to do that! No experienced sailor would have tried in those conditions. Best at that juncture to just go with bare poles. Just more stupid action for the screen.
When he was swept over the side with his harness and tether he pulled himself back out of the water and over the lifelines. Once you are off the boat that is usually it. A wave might throw you back on the boat but it is very, very, very doubtful one would be able to pull themselves up out of a 5 to 7 knot current (forward motion of the boat) and over the life lines.
When the boat goes over and he is on deck he also manages to swim back to the boat. Conditions that knock down a 12 ton boat are not conducive to swimming back to one's cockpit.
In the movie Robert Redford entered his life raft way too early. One should “steps UP to one’s life raft”. As long as the boat is still floating (and not on fire) the boat is one’s best means of survival.
Robert Redford has loads of time to outfit his life raft. How does he spend his time? Shaving and digging around for a sextant. Any seasoned sailor would have continued outfitting the raft with as much water as possible and then acquiring more food, first aid and communication equipment.
The idea that with no previous knowledge and in a bobbing raft he could accurately judge his longitude well enough to mark his exact location on the chart (over and over) is again absurd.
When the life raft flips he swims out to right it. The type of life raft he was in has baffles that make the life raft self righting. They flip over and over in REALLY rough seas. If he left the life raft the chances of getting back in rough seas (no less righting a few thousand pounds of ballasted life raft) are next to nothing.
He goes in the water three times. The chances of him getting tossed in the water THREE times and making it back each time – well again that is absurd.
I could go on and on. Just about every scene is this movie was absurd.
Just about the only thing I liked was his solar still. I never heard of making one out of a Jerry jug.

Overall RIDICULOUS film!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Anyways, I hope you don't mind my rant.

[Matt]

I haven't seen the film and didn't read your spoiler, but I did get to overhear an old guy in the locker room last week rip this movie to shreds based on the potentially fatal sailing mistakes Redford's character makes. Also, he thought Redford was never much of an actor.

[FerdinandGriffon]

Also, he thought Redford was never much of an actor.

That wasn't me, but it could have been.

[mfunk9786]

This continues to reinforce my theory that if you know too much about a subject, perhaps you should skip the film based upon it. I had major issues with Moneyball because of the rather inane changes made to the realities of a baseball team from only a decade ago, which led me to begin to ponder this - and then there was the Neil deGrasse Tyson incident with Gravity (and I'm not implying that my baseball knowledge matches his physics knowledge, but hey, I watched a lot of SportsCenter and a lot of baseball games that season!), and now this post about All is Lost. It seems like if they make a film about your profession or hobby or area of expertise, you might just want to avoid the possible disappointment altogether unless you're willing and able to suspend disbelief for two hours.

[dustybooks]

Well, it's essentially that Simpsons episode where Itchy and Scratchy build a tent and Bart shoots holes through its logic, right?

I see both sides of the debate on how important absolute realism is to a film like this, but I think the filmmakers made the proper dramatic choice -- it "feels" real, even if it isn't exactly. But I can see how that would be extremely frustrating to some part of the audience.

[swo17]

I think the key question is this: Is the film intended to educate? If it's teaching faulty survivor skills that someone might expect to be able to put into practice, there's potentially an ethical issue there. Similarly, if a film cuts corners in capturing a certain character's background (i.e. resorting to stereotypes), this may not matter as much if the offending character trait is relatively innocuous to the story, but it can be very damaging--maybe even propagandistic--if the aim of the film is to disparage said background.

[warren oates]

In these cases, I think every detail is fair game and ought to be considered for analysis and debate. After all, isn't the challenge of making realistic, procedural films to raise the standard beyond a mere suspension of disbelief. At the same time, "This shouldn't happen" is not the same as "this would never/could never happen." I wish I had more time right now to go through FG's uncle's list point by point. But I will say that there are some objections that, er, seem to hold more water than others. As with true survival stories like Touching the Void*, the unlikely/implausible but not impossible choices -- like having Redford go off his boat/raft and recover numerous times -- are less problematic for me than bigger questions (some of which take place offscreen and before the story starts):

Spoiler

Like I wrote in another entry above and echoed by FG's uncle: given the current year and the degree to which the rest of his boat seems so nicely appointed and prepared, where are all those back-up waterproof radios and GPS rescue beacons he ought to have? That he doesn't patch the hole immediately seems more of a problem to me now, likewise why he doesn't just bail with a pail, if that exact model of bilge pump he has is as inefficient when operating manually as FG's uncle says. The timing of the storm sail might be off, but that seems forgivable given everything else he's been going through. I don't quite understand why the angle at which the shipping container hits is so obviously incorrect, given that it is floating/moving too and we don't see how the boat is moving (or if and how it is sea-anchored or drifting etc.) before it hits in the first few moments while Redford is asleep.

I do think there's some wiggle room with regards to Our Man's choices. He seems like an experienced sailor, but not necessarily one who's ever sailed across an ocean or around the world by himself. That gives me enough breathing room to forgive him some of the lesser sailing sins that FG's uncle wouldn't likely commit. I've never taken this film as a flowchart with Our Man against Nature executing every decision he takes optimally. I think all the best survival fiction and the most compelling true life tales I've encountered have elements of Man against Self too, where the cascading/compounding crisis often pushes the protagonist to make choices more quickly than he has the capacity to judge them.

*

Spoiler

After a certain point in that story, half the climbing/survival decisions they make are choices that they shouldn't and each time they come out alive they are very much beating the odds.

[Mr Sausage]

Gravity discussion moved here.