The Weight of Water (2000)
Oct. 4th, 2009 09:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byers Kathryn Bigelow’s extraordinary command of subjectivity has always been her outstanding talent, one which has made her a peculiar and peculiarly contemporary variant on the under sung (and underemployed) Robert Mulligan. Whereas Mulligan mostly assumed the viewpoints of young people caught up in some entanglement of love, Bigelow prefers her young adults to get mixed up in violence, preferably lethal violence. And only K-19: The Widowmaker, Bigelow’s most recent movie, lacked a bristling psycho-sexual element to the violence (no, I’m not forgetting Point Break).
-- Henry Sheehan, review of The Weight of Water
This movie was completed in 2000 but wasn't released in theaters until 2002. The distributor apparently didn't think much of it, and neither did most mainstream critics. I'm not sure what I think of it after one viewing. It's certainly new territory for Bigelow, with the story split between a modern search for the truth behind an old murder of two women on a tiny island on the New Hampshire coast, and a story set in the time of the murder on Smuttynose Island in the late 19th century. Amongst other things, this is the first time that Bigelow has done a period story, and it feels strange to have her hypermodern visual style applied to a pre-modern setting. This is also very much about the dimensions and tensions and failures of heterosexual relationships, which is usually not her main focus at all.
It's not exactly a thriller, but there is a crime of passion at the heart of it, and it does build to an explosive climax. Some of the modern story does seems a bit obvious, and my first take is that Sean Penn gives an overly mannered, empty performance. On the other hand, the protagonist of this part of the story is his wife, played by Catherine MacCormack, and it could be that the portrayal of the husband as a bit of a nobody (despite being a famous poet) is intentional. The layers of betrayal and grievance and misunderstanding are pretty complex, in both stories. There's also a languor to this film that is reminiscent of Bigelow's first film, The Loveless, and which may initially seem at odds with the generically melodramatic surface.
The movie is undeniably beautiful to look at. I just love Bigelow's visual style. The opening credit sequence is an amazing work of abstraction that incorporates elements of scenes to come. She once again (as in Blue Steel) is very focused on the gaze of her characters, what they see, what they don't see, what they communicate to each other with their glances. Again, there's an urgency undercutting the languor, a fine sense of detail and contrast amid the too-obvious motions and emotions.
It gets into very strange territory at the climax, leading some reviewers to call this a metaphysical story. Maybe so. There's some kind of transference going on between the two strands of history in the movie, but it's hard to say what the nature or substance of the transference is.
Since Sheehan has some provocative insights, I'll let him have the final word too:
Bigelow herself never seems to know what her characters are going to do or why – become vampires or stay human, stay cops or go crooked, be men or women. Some viewers like the sense of spontaneity of open-endedness this gives her film. But the same self-conscious skepticism that leads her down that path, also lays Bigelow open to charges of genre overkill. Some of us think that, in a world that celebrates The Matrix, picking out the director of Strange Days for such a charge is absurd. So it will be interesting to see what the observers who swoon over the glorified classroom exercise, Far from Heaven, will make of the living The Weight of Water.
-- Henry Sheehan, review of The Weight of Water
This movie was completed in 2000 but wasn't released in theaters until 2002. The distributor apparently didn't think much of it, and neither did most mainstream critics. I'm not sure what I think of it after one viewing. It's certainly new territory for Bigelow, with the story split between a modern search for the truth behind an old murder of two women on a tiny island on the New Hampshire coast, and a story set in the time of the murder on Smuttynose Island in the late 19th century. Amongst other things, this is the first time that Bigelow has done a period story, and it feels strange to have her hypermodern visual style applied to a pre-modern setting. This is also very much about the dimensions and tensions and failures of heterosexual relationships, which is usually not her main focus at all.
It's not exactly a thriller, but there is a crime of passion at the heart of it, and it does build to an explosive climax. Some of the modern story does seems a bit obvious, and my first take is that Sean Penn gives an overly mannered, empty performance. On the other hand, the protagonist of this part of the story is his wife, played by Catherine MacCormack, and it could be that the portrayal of the husband as a bit of a nobody (despite being a famous poet) is intentional. The layers of betrayal and grievance and misunderstanding are pretty complex, in both stories. There's also a languor to this film that is reminiscent of Bigelow's first film, The Loveless, and which may initially seem at odds with the generically melodramatic surface.
The movie is undeniably beautiful to look at. I just love Bigelow's visual style. The opening credit sequence is an amazing work of abstraction that incorporates elements of scenes to come. She once again (as in Blue Steel) is very focused on the gaze of her characters, what they see, what they don't see, what they communicate to each other with their glances. Again, there's an urgency undercutting the languor, a fine sense of detail and contrast amid the too-obvious motions and emotions.
It gets into very strange territory at the climax, leading some reviewers to call this a metaphysical story. Maybe so. There's some kind of transference going on between the two strands of history in the movie, but it's hard to say what the nature or substance of the transference is.
Since Sheehan has some provocative insights, I'll let him have the final word too:
Bigelow herself never seems to know what her characters are going to do or why – become vampires or stay human, stay cops or go crooked, be men or women. Some viewers like the sense of spontaneity of open-endedness this gives her film. But the same self-conscious skepticism that leads her down that path, also lays Bigelow open to charges of genre overkill. Some of us think that, in a world that celebrates The Matrix, picking out the director of Strange Days for such a charge is absurd. So it will be interesting to see what the observers who swoon over the glorified classroom exercise, Far from Heaven, will make of the living The Weight of Water.
