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Rating:
It couldn't be otherwise. Chandor is a director of twists and experiments. His debut "Margin Call" was a great exercise in writing, all focused on words and dialogues, and Chandor's evolution leads to its exact opposite: the almost total absence of them, with Robert Redford in "All Is Lost" adrift in the Indian Ocean. Alone, with no friendly face to help him, no functioning electronic equipment to call for rescue. Nothing at all except for an old man facing the ocean alone in a desperate attempt to survive the brutality of the sea.
Inevitable that the New Jersey filmmaker entrusted the task of explanation to images and sounds. The direction "limits" itself to stalking dear old Redford and balances between insistent close-ups, abrupt movements in the complex storm scenes, and sudden wide shots of the vastness of the ocean horizon. Chandor, a talented man, alternates these two phases of stasis and action, trying to temper the inevitably sluggish rhythm of a work that suffers from immobility. Certainly, a single character who says nothing for an hour and a half does not help, but that's what Chandor decided, as he writes the scripts for his works himself. Supporting the overall film structure is the soundtrack by Alex Ebert: his work is even more worthy of mention given the supremacy of silences and the sound of the sea lapping. When Ebert's music intervenes, the film is charged with additional dramatic force, and perhaps it is no coincidence the Golden Globe was won precisely for this work.
One might say that "All Is Lost" is simply a kind of stylistic exercise all about form, vaguely suggesting symbolic backdrops about man's solitude, the will to survive, the strength not to abandon hope, and so on. One might also say it is like "The Old Man and the Sea" with "indie modernism" photography, but what Chandor does, like few other directors today, is use a story to tell us about society; because looking more deeply at Chandor's second film, one notices countless references to the world market system: Redford's small sailboat is torn by a container, a symbol of mercantile massification, technological gadgets are useless since they are no longer working, and colossal cargo ships do not notice him and sail away like elephantine sea giants. What reignites hope in an ending that perhaps was better left "gloomy" is a small boat and a man, the first to appear apart from the protagonist and who acts with contact, not words. Return to the human.
The second work of the American director, one of the most promising in the States, has its flaws and allows for some "bloopers" that are unforgivable for someone like Chandor, always attentive to detail. In short, Redford going into the water and in the next shot being completely dry is something that could have been avoided, as well as other implausible situations we witness. Despite errors, blemishes, and a rhythm that will be indigestible to many, credit must be given to J.C. Chandor for having constructed a film that is paradoxically claustrophobic despite the spatiality of its setting, where the disturbing element is the awareness of being trapped in immensity.
"All Is Lost" is a controversial work, which three years after its release still divides critics and audiences. A film that one may like or not, but that shows the work of a director who in it tried to develop Cinema, an increasingly rare commodity...
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