LIMBO

continues at the Phoenix, Walton Street until 27 January 2000

John Sayles, much like Robert Altman in the 1970s, is an American film-maker, who manages to make challenging and provocative independent films about ‘ordinary’ people without edging into the distractions of arthouse affectation. Particularly in John Sayles’ case, that integrity is about a special kind of realism. Thus, his films are concerned with the observance of the ostensible everyday lives of those characters but also about what is ‘really’ there beneath the surface in those lives.

The basic plot of his new film Limbo clearly embodies that film-making ethos: the first half of the film opens out with a broad panoramic view of the inhabitants of a bleak Alaskan fishing town, where the run-down former industries are starkly contrasted with the trite marketing of the tourist trade. (Not insignificantly I don’t recall a single ray of sunshine in any of the many outdoor sequences!) Before long, we are focussed on a trio of disenchanted characters who will dominate the film: Joe Gastineau (David Straithairn), a handyman about town and former fisherman, still coming to terms with the dark memories of a boating tragedy years earlier, rootless lounge singer Donna de Angello (actress, Mary Mastrantonio) who takes him on as the latest in a long line of failed relationships, and her troubled teenage daughter Noelle (played by Vanessa Martinez). What is perhaps most impressive in the film is the subtlety with which our interest in these characters is developed. When half way through the three are suddenly thrown together in a situation of considerable danger with a prolonged fight for survival, the director manages to avoid the pitfalls of over-dramatisation or heavy sentiment that you suspect would mar a work of most other film-makers working with such a premise. Just as the first part of the film anticipates the later crises with reference to the threat from the natural elements, and from the dangers of ruthless profiteering, so the later drama somehow brings out qualities in the main characters (both good and bad) which were already latent in the early scenes. The acting is uniformly excellent. Kris Kristofferson and Casey Seimaszko provide memorable cameos, the former bringing a tangible sense of danger to the scenes he appears in, and David Straithairn and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio have never done anything better. As writer, director and also editor of the film, Sayles brings an aggregate of meticulous but subtle and assured craftsmanship that gives wonderful shape to these performances. Limbo is a film about the ‘big questions’ in life but wears its baggage lightly.Finally, I’ve read elsewhere that the ending of the film is a disappointment. It isn’t. It is an audacious cinematic gesture that builds an extraordinary tension then cuts in with a stunning anti-climax that takes your breath away; an unresolved ending that proves most satisfying because it feeds hack into a deeper sense of what the ‘limbo’ is all about. A remarkable film.

Steve Thompson