Movie of the week
As in all narrative or temporal art, movie endings are very important. “It copped out at the end” is a familiar, negative judgment of a film, though in Hollywood movies especially there is often a mad rush in the final reel to tie up the loose ends strewn about the story. Yet we want to leave the cinema feeling good: the lovers have been reunited, the villains have met pleasingly unpleasant ends. And, while we don’t want movies to resolve themselves too easily – a happy ending, somehow, has to be earned – we still desire the satisfaction of dramatic closure, a conclusion that makes sense of what has gone before.
So it takes a courageous director to end a movie on a startlingly inconclusive note, to leave things hanging. John Sayles is such a director, and his new film Limbo ends (or stops) in a way very reminiscent of Nadine Gordimer’s radically open-ended novel July’s People.
More than that the critic cannot say without divulging too much. But, for me, the ending works: by denying the audience an answer to the most obvious questions set up by the narrative, it forces us to find more subtle means of making sense of it. For the characters in the film, at least, it shows that they are ready to face the future – whatever it holds. Which is a kind of happy ending, though perhaps a bit too close to real life for most viewers. Can we face the unknowable, or do we want the comfort of a neatly packaged fantasy?
The whole of Limbo, in fact, is closer to real life than most movies try to get. In a loose-limbed, organic style akin to Robert Altman’s, Sayles depicts a handful of characters in a small Alaskan town on the verge of commercial exploitation, juxtaposing a busy communal life with the desolation of unpeopled spaces.
Donna (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) is a small-time singer in transition between one short-lived gig and another. Joe (David Strathairn) is a former fisherman haunted by an episode in his past that makes it hard for him to get on with his life. Donna’s daughter Noelle (Vanessa Martinez) is an adolescent caught in that uncertain territory between childhood and adulthood. They are all stuck in some kind of limbo.
How these people interact and come to connect is the film’s story; unexpected events will throw them into a starker, more dangerous kind of limbo. Sayles charts these developments in a low-key, unhurried way, letting these characters emerge in all their fluid complexity.
Many will find Limbo irksome, and not just because of its ending. Sayles doesn’t push the usual buttons, doesn’t manipulate the audience. He’s willing to leave us, too, suspended in a state of limbo. But that, for me, makes it a particularly brave and interesting film. We need our fantasies, but we also need some real life.