Film Journal July 2018

ADRIFT
STX FILMS/Color/2.35/Dolby Atmos/110 MIns./
Rated PG-13
Cast: Shailene Woodley, Sam Claflin, Jeffrey Thomas,
Elizabeth Hawthorne, Grace Palmer.
Directed by Baltasar Kormákur.
Screenplay: Aaron Kandell, Jordan Kandell, David Branson
Smith, based on the book by Tami Oldham Ashcraft
with Susea McGearhart.
Produced by Shailene Woodley, Baltasar Kormákur, Aaron
Kandell, Jordan Kandell.
Executive producers: Andrea Scarso, Stephen Fuss, Tom
Rosenberg, Gary Lucchesi, Eric Reid, Wang Zhongjun,
Wang Zhonglei, Felice Bee, Robert Simonds, Adam
Fogelson, David Kosse, Ralph Winter, Magnús Vioar
Sigurosson.
Director of photography: Robert Richardson.
Production designer: Heimir Sverrisson.
Editor: John Gilbert.
Music: Volker Bertelmann.
Visual effects supervisor: Dadi Einarsson.
Sound mixer: Fred Enholmer.
An STXfilms, Lakeshore Entertainment, Huayi Brothers
Pictures and Ingenious presentation of an RVK Studios
production.
Two young soul mates battle for survival
in the Pacific after a hurricane cripples their
yacht.
A survival tale set in the Pacific, Adrift uses
filmmaking savvy to paper over a thin plot. A
committed performance from Shailene Woodley
(also one of the project’s many producers) may
help draw viewers, but they won’t find much
new here apart from technical dazzle.
Based on a true story, Adrift starts immediately
after a hurricane has disabled a yacht
crossing the Pacific to San Diego. Tami Oldham
(Woodley) flails around a flooded cabin before
dragging herself to the deck. Both of the yacht’s
masts are down. What’s worse, she can’t find
her boyfriend, Richard Sharp (Sam Claflin).
Flashbacks bring Tami to Tahiti, a free spirit
who supports herself with odd jobs while shipping
from port to port. But the arrival of Richard,
piloting a sailboat he built in Africa, changes
her mind. Hitting it off, the two are soon cruising
the islands and talking about marriage.
Director and producer Baltasar Kormákur
interrupts the flashbacks with progress reports
on the post-hurricane yacht. The decision to
play with time frames makes sense on some
levels. It allows Kormákur to open the film
with a bang. Background filler seems to have a
deeper meaning, more suspense, with a killer
storm lurking over the horizon. And whether
watching the past or the present, viewers will
be anticipating how Kormákur depicts the hurricane
itself.
Unfortunately, most of the scenes in the
past are just sappy. Romantic picnics, dancing
in waterfront nightclubs, strolls along beaches
all unfold in paradisiacal settings. But Tami and
Richard have next to nothing interesting to say,
even when talking about suicide and abandonment.
Post-hurricane dialogue is even worse,
as the characters slowly starve and slip into
hallucinations caused in part by dehydration.
Meanwhile, the score by Volker Bertelmann, also
known as Hauschka, telegraphs every moment
of suspense, whether justified or not. Tami can’t
dip her toes into the water without the music
suggesting imminent shark attack.
Survival films like White Squall or more
recently All Is Lost work from similar incidents.
Sails wrap around rudders, electronics fail, supplies
are rationed, wounds fester. It’s a limited
repertoire that no number of Techno Cranes or
submersible camera mounts can overcome, that
flashbacks and monologues can’t broaden. And
when the movie’s one big plot twist becomes
common knowledge, Adrift will seem even more
like a stunt than a drama.
Despite all its flaws, Adrift builds to an emotionally
powerful ending, one that is simultaneously
melancholy and uplifting. Maybe it’s Woodley’s
sincerity, her determination to do right by
Tami’s character. Or maybe it’s Kormákur’s skill at
giving catastrophe a narrative shape. Against the
odds, something gives Adrift real dramatic weight.
—Daniel Eagan
HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS
AT PARTIES
A24/Color/1.85/102 Mins./Rated R
Cast: Elle Fanning, Alex Sharp, Nicole Kidman, Matt Lucas,
Ruth Wilson, AJ Lewis, Ethan Lawrence, Edward Petherbridge,
Joanna Scanlan, Tom Brooke, Alice Sanders.
Directed by John Cameron Mitchell.
Screenplay: Philippa Goslett, John Cameron Mitchell,
based on the short story by Neil Gaiman.
Produced by Howard Gertler, Iain Canning, Emile
Sherman, John Cameron Mitchell.
Executive producers: Neil Gaiman, David Kosse, Rose
Garnett, Hugo Heppell, Charles Auty, Thorsten
Schumacher, Michael J. Werner, Winnie Lau, Peter
Fornstam, Josie Ho.
Director of photography: Frank DeMarco.
Production designer: Helen Scott.
Editor: Brian A. Kates.
Costume designer: Sandy Powell.
Music: Nico Muhly, Matmos.
Original songs: Martin Tomlinson, Bryan Weller.
Animation: John Bair
A See-Saw Films and Little Punk production.
A typical teenager—insecure, hormonal
and in love with the power of music to paper
over life’s dull patches—falls for an alien in
this sweetly daffy picture about coming of age
in punk-era England.
1977, Croydon: Aspiring graphic novelist
Enn (Alex Sharp), who self-publishes a zine
called Virys (because unconventional spelling
is way rebellious) is a good kid with a quiet
rebellious streak. He and his best friends,
chubby John (Ethan Lawrence) and Vic (AJ
Lewis)—who’s working a cool Billy Idol look
and doing his best not to let on how utterly
clueless he is about the mysteries of sex—live
for punk music, whose raucous anger says
everything they’re too well-behaved to shout.
The country is in the grip of Silver Jubilee
fever—it’s the 25th anniversary of Queen
Elizabeth’s coronation—but the inseparable
friends (which is another way of saying they’re
too geeky for anyone else to want anything to
do with them) get wind of a house party that’s
better than any of them could have imagined:
It’s in an actual house, the music is great and
the hosts are cool in a weird way—which is, of
course, the coolest cool way to be.
But the fact is, their hosts are seriously
not from around here: They’re extraterrestrial
entities from the galaxy Vinyl Fetish Outfits.
They hitch rides in human bodies, love to
dance, and one of them—a cute girl named
Zan (Elle Fanning), who prefers regular gear to
orange and red get-ups that involve suggestive
patches over what hygiene teachers used to
call “personal areas” favored by her people (if
one can call them that), takes a shine to the
sweetly awkward Enn, who can’t believe his luck,
because the better he gets to know her, the
cooler she gets. The inevitable snag is that she’s
on an educational tour of the third rock from
the Sun and in 48 hours she has to go back
home…plus there’s talk of an upcoming event
ominously called “The Eating.”
As stories geared to young adult viewers
go, How to Talk… hits every standard note: the
hero who’s going on to better things if he can
just get through this stage of his so-called life;
the hapless friends; the clueless parents; the
problematic romance; the hangouts and the
power of music to unite tribes. One might
expect something a little edgier from a film
directed and co-written by John Cameron
Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch), whose
story originated with Neil Gaiman (Coraline)…
something more like the 1969 Robert
Silverberg story “Passengers,” about alien
entities who hijack human bodies for sexual
adventuring. But that wouldn’t be called How to
Talk to Girls at Parties, a title that neatly sums up
a world of youthful angst.
How to Talk… doesn’t aim to shock and awe,
so it’s unfair to take it to task for not doing
so. And the story’s inevitable understanding
grownup—in this case punk ring-mistress
Boadicea, a clothing designer with glam brideof-Frankenstein
hair and a warehouse/home/
hangout whose spiky industrial décor fairly
screams that this is the place to be—gives
Nicole Kidman an opportunity to channel her
inner Vivienne Westwood while proving that it is
possible to make it past voting age without your
heart dying.
For all its calculated oddness, How to Talk
to Girls at Parties is fundamentally good-natured
and the fact that it occasionally lands a nice one,
like the moment when the young folks justify
the aliens’ odd behavior by theorizing that they
must be part of one of those crazy suicide cults
they’re heard about, is above and beyond its call
of duty. And as one of the aliens, U.K. actress
Ruth Wilson (best known for the television
series “The Affair”) deploys her sublime lip
curl to excellent effect. Sometimes little things
mean a lot, especially in movies whose dramatic
travails (at least for the humans; Zan’s people
have more exotic issues) run to well-meaning
but clueless parents, getting home before
curfew and figuring out the mechanics of
kissing—things that just a few years after they
mean everything are gathering dust in the attic of
embarrassing memories.
—Maitland McDonagh
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