Ron Howard has always taken pride in being an eclectic filmmaker — in the last 40 years, he has made movies about mermaids, cocoons, auto factories, astronauts, firefighters, newspapers, beautiful minds, cave rescuers, the Grinch, the Da Vinci Code, the Beatles, and Pavarotti. But at the Toronto Film Festival premiere of his latest movie, “Eden,” he declared that the film stands farther apart from his other work than anything he has ever done. He’s right, though not for the reason he thinks.
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“Eden,” which is based on events that unfolded 100 years ago on one of the Galápagós Islands, is a difficult movie to characterize. It’s been labeled as a “thriller,” but I would describe it as a misanthropic survivalist “Robinson Crusoe” meets “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” with deranged footnotes by Friedrich Nietzsche. For Howard, the film sure is different (it has sex, murder, and animal slaughter). Yet there’s another word for it — the word is terrible. While there’s no denying that Howard has made the ultimate movie that’s not in his wheelhouse, what’s most different about it isn’t the eccentric subject matter. It’s that Howard got so immersed in the subject, so possessed by it, so lost in it that he forgot to do what he can usually do in his sleep: tell a relatable story.
From the outset, we’re nagged by the question: If the characters are historically based and “real,” then why do they feel so hopped-up and synthetic? Jude Law, who I just saw give what may be the best performance of his career as an FBI agent in “The Order,” here descends into hambone Teutonic surliness as Friedrich Ritter, a German physician who has turned his back on society to go to the isolated green island of Floreana, in the southern part of Ecuador’s Galápagós Archipelago. It’s 1929, and while the debacle of World War I is long over, the world has been plunged into economic collapse. Ritter believes that what lies ahead is total destruction of the old order, with the possibility that a new utopia could be built on top of it. And he, by God, is going to be the one to design it!
He’s working, with a messianic fury, on a manifesto that he sits at his typewriter all day long pounding away at ( clack clack clack! ), drawing swaths of dark inspiration from Nietzsche. Ritter is trying to imagine a new future, but he already appears to have given up the ghost of it. His exhortations are driven by a cynical bluster, a loss of faith in mankind; that seems to be the real reason that he’s abandoned Germany to live as a tropical hermit. He does have his wife with him, Dora (Vanessa Kirby), and together they carry on like a debauched Adam and Eve. She’s there to support his grand vision, but the two fight even more than they fornicate, and what we feel, watching them, is that the Ritters are on a crusade that seems doomed, because it’s nuts. Friedrich is no Nietzsche. He comes off more like a warped 1960s monomaniac who’s done too many drugs.
So what’s at stake? That’s what Howard and his screenwriter, Noah Pink, never figured out. Early on, another couple show up, and they’re the opposite of the Ritters. Heinz Wittmer (Daniel Brühl) and his wife, Margaret (Sydney Sweeney), have come to Floreana because they’ve been following accounts of the Ritters and want to join their movement. They’ve brought along their son, Harry (Jonathan Tittel), because he has tuberculosis and they couldn’t afford to place him in a sanitarium; maybe the island air will cure him. You’d think a communal theorist like Ritter would welcome these disciples, but no — he just wants them to go away. He sets them up in the stone grotto nearby, explaining how hard is to even get fresh water on the island. He doesn’t exactly roll out the welcome shrub, and it’s not as if there’s some dramatic connection between the two couples. The interactions are downbeat and disgruntled.
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Howard has said that he based “Eden” on two conflicting accounts of the events it depicts, and that’s how it plays: as a film that never locates a point of identification. We’re held at arm’s length, observing the characters as if they were part of an insect colony. We also get to observe a lot of wildlife: crabs, wild pigs, a full-frontal Jude Law.
Then a mystery player shows up — yet another island visitor, though this one has a very different agenda. Ana de Armas, the charismatic actress from “Knives Out” and “Blonde,” plays Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn, a.k.a. the baroness, a party-girl fatale who arrives with a passel of men, and with her stated intention of building a luxury hotel on the island. Is she serious? Is she really a baroness? De Armas plays her with a ripe smile of amorality and an accent that makes her sound like Madeline Kahn in “Young Frankenstein.” She acts like she’s in a ’30s drawing-room comedy, which is rather absurd, but for a while you can feel the movie come alive when she’s onscreen. The rest of the time, it keeps sinking into its sluggish morass of bad vibes (and even de Armas’s hauteur starts to wear thin).
“Eden” lopes along, without energy or purpose, but with a great deal of random showboating. Sydney Sweeney gets the film’s radiant-center-of-sanity award. Her Margaret is humble and likable, and though she has to go through a childbirth scene that’s all but designed to make us squirm, you feel something for her.
Yet as the relationships slowly disintegrate, and the film begins to turn into some weirdly madcap version of “Lord of the Flies,” we’re not sure how to take in what we’re seeing. Howard should have worked harder to ensure that the audience was invested in these people from the beginning. He seems to assume that we’ll just go along for the ride. But I can’t imagine that there’ll be much of an audience for “Eden,” a movie that makes you want to get off that island and go back to a place where the people are sane.
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