All is Lost - 2 smiles

There’s a brief voiceover in the opening of “All is Lost,” where Robert Redford’s character declares, ‘All is lost.’ Knowing that every effort will ultimately fail, the minutia of these efforts, the nuts and bolts of tasks the man undertakes, become tedious to watch rather than fascinating (as, I’m sure, the writer-director J.C. Chandor had hoped). The storyline is simple: a man discovers his sailboat has collided with a shipping container left floating on the high seas and he has a large gash in the side of his boat. Then it becomes a tale of man vs. nature.

The film contains almost no dialogue so you can only guess what Redford’s character (who has no name) is going to do. Redford gives a Herculean performance, but you wonder why his character isn’t better prepared. He has to read a manual on how to use a sextant. Wouldn’t you expect a man sailing by himself in the middle of the Indian Ocean would know how to use one? Or how to navigate using the stars? And you’d really like to know what he thinks he’s doing. Who is this guy? Why is he sailing by himself? You empathize with any human being staring at his own mortality. But Chandor has given us no background and we rarely know what Redford’s character is thinking. For a character to have complexity, he must resolve inner conflicts as well as outer and we have no insight into any of this. It’s just a man losing his battle with the sea. (And didn’t Hemingway do it better with Old Man and the Sea?) Although Redford is good (he’ll probably get an Oscar nomination), “All is Lost” is a gimmick with no dialogue.  11/7/13