Limbo

Rating:
Summary: Limbo- Suspended in an intermediate place or state.
Review: Limbo is at first not terribly unlike the first acts of A Perfect Storm. It explores life on the shores of a small Alaskan town getting to know the hopes and dreams of its people trying to make a living of the fat of the land and fish in the waters. The gathering place in the village is a local bar where regulars, including Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, meet to discuss their economic struggles and maybe get lucky. The similarities to A Perfect Storm don't end there. The story turns on what promises to be an uneventful trip on a fishing boat into a struggle for three people to survive against nature. Limbo is really people trying to make connections and cope with the shortcomings of the hand they have been dealt in life. But one of the boat's passengers has a secret that gets everyone into a lot of trouble with some drug dealers and the film suddenly takes on a whole new dynamic. Eventually this leads to a moment of great suspense. I must admit my reason for liking this film rests entirely on the film's finale which evoked one of the strongest audience reactions I have ever experienced. Many in the audience gasped, others were stunned and outraged, some laughed. It was a good ending and I think it was the best way it could have ended. But I don't know that I would have enjoyed it nearly as much without being able to listen to everyone else react to it. Because so much of your opinion of Limbo will ultimately depend upon how you deal with the conclusion, see it at your own risk. I can only safely recommend this film to people who enjoy slower paced character films like Atom Egoyan's, The Sweet Hereafter.

Rating:
Summary: Limbo captures Alaska
Review: I'm not a big fan of film. I'm a Librarian and a voracious reader. I caught the first fifteen minutes of this film on cable and then had to leave. I was really struck by the film- maker's authentic contemporary portrait of Alaska. So I picked it up at the local video store. I lived for ten years in Alaska and I have yet to see Hollywood produce a realistic portrayal of the last frontier. Sayles gets it right when he shows the tension between the tourist industry, the old industries like fishing and canning contrasted with the incredible beauty of Alaska. I just hate it when Alaska is treated by the tourist industry as some great theme park. That's not what it is! It's an amazing, wild place - really beautiful! - but in the beauty is terror and Sayles captures it in this film. When the locals are sitting around the bar talking about the people they've known who died in fishing, boating or flying accidents it gave me chills! Only in Alaska! I was also impressed with the acting, especially : MARY ELIZABETH MASTRANTONIO, DAVID STRAITHAIRN,VANESSA MARTINEZ. Excellent choices! And Mastrantonio's singing is heartbreaking. If you are Alaskan you need to see this film.

Rating:
Summary: A pile of loose strings with a "Lady or Tiger" ending.
Review: I, like most people in my town, saw this movie because it was filmed in my town. When the movie finally ended, there there was the sound of a large group people groaning in unison coming from the viewers.

There were many sub-plots that had absolutley nothing to do with the main plot in progress. They were never resolved. They could have been interesting if they were main plots themselves, but as it was, it just became some stuff that happened.

The ending was similar to that of the famous "lady or the tiger" story. It built up an uncertainty about what was going to happen, and then left you right when it was going to be revealed.

I didn't like it. But it was more than just that, it was the fact that there were many interesting plot points that had great potential that went absolutley nowhere. That is what made the movie bad. Not the lack of action, not the acting, but the enormous pile of loose ends that really should have been finished.

Rating:
Summary: Did you see the significance?
Review: I wasn't too impressed the first time this film was "force fed" to me. I'm only human, what can I say. But now this is one of my all time favorite motion pictures. First of all, it satisfied a scant curiosity for me. Namely, what's Alaska like? That question was answered immediately by watching "Limbo." Alaska is one of the most mysterious and culturally rich states in the union. "Limbo" is an extremely rewarding excursion in character development: good acting and believable situations. It brings us a grand assortment of humanity: A duped lesbian couple, their curmudgeon of a landlord; wise native-Americans; an emotionally-starved folk singer (flawlessly acted by Mary Elizabeth Mastrontonio); a crooked bush pilot (wonderfully played by Kris Kristopherson; a saddened fisherman (David Strathairn's lowkey yet powerful performance) and a beautiful, frightened teenage girl (Vanessa Martinez's awe-inspiring debut). I'm only scratching the surface: the texture of this movie's !characters is rich and immeasurable. Like a salmon (Alaskan analogy) you get hooked and trawled in to this incredibly beautiful film.

The plot is simplistic yet intriguing: the singer becomes quickly attracted to the fisherman. Her daughter, a complex and lonely girl finds relief through self-mutilation and story-writing. This performance (perfectly executed by Vanessa Martinez) is the highlight of the film. Her deeply-imbedded sorrow will simply break your heart. I've never seen such an incredible performance by any actress in all my years of movie-watching. Her portrayal of the rebellious daughter Noelle is so rich and convincing that I'll never forgive the academy of motion picture arts and sciences for not giving her an Oscar nomination--It's THAT GOOD. Anyway the three of them ended up stranded on a deserted island after fleeing form murderous drug dealers. Simple yet not-so-simple. (Trust me, you'll see what I'm saying._

Now about the ending. IF YOU HAVEN'!T SEEN "LIMBO" DON'T READ THE REST OF THIS REVIEW. But it's a "brow-raiser." At the beginning of the movie we see salmon trapped in a river during spawing. Just like them we--the viewers--are in a state of limbo wondering the fates of the main characters.
I highly recommend "Limbo." Watching it has changed and enriched my life. (Good soundtrack too!_

Rating:
Summary: A great movie, and...
Review: ...worth seeing just to hear Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio sing - she has an unbelievable voice.

Rating:
Summary: Don't do the Limbo
Review: If you like to watch paint dry, you'll love this movie.

Rating:
Summary: Fade to Grey
Review: Movies can be a very predictable thing. Be they disaster films, action films, prison films, love stories, tragedies, horror, gore-fests, comedies, drug movies, political polemics, sci-fi extravaganzas or a hybrid of some or all the above, most fit neatly into their designated slots. Watch five minutes of a film, any film, at your local theatre or on TV, and you should, with little difficulty, prescribe it to the genre that bore it. Occasionally, you get a genre-buster like Pulp Fiction that causes a deserved furor, is worshipped reverently by critics, and inevitably spawns thousands of bastard pale imitations. John Sayles's 1999 production, Limbo, is not so easily defined. It is an authentic, flavorful drama that takes an acute turn into a completely different genre (one that I will try not to reveal), thwarting the most hardened viewer's expectations. The only film, I can think of, that took such an acute turn off its expected path was Robert Rodriguez's silly, phantasmagoric From Dusk Till Dawn. Rodriguez was kidding. Sayles is not.

Significantly, the film is set in Alaska. This, a news montage informs us over the credits, is the "last great American frontier". Here a lounge singer, Donna (Mary Elizabeth Masterantonio) entertains at a wedding, her anguished daughter, Noelle (Vanessa Martinez), serves refreshments while a quiet handyman, Joe (David Strathairn) looks on. While introducing his principal threesome Sayles incredulously cuts to the father of the bride, a caricature, blabbering on how Alaska has a potential to one huge theme park. "The Disnefication of Alaska", he calls it. After her set, Donna runs over to Joe, a stranger, and asks for a lift into town. She, a depressed extrovert, rages about her loser boyfriend and how she's going to leave him. He, a depressed introvert, humbly admits to being a basketball fan and a former fisherman. They both agree that they have been victims of "unforeseen circumstances". Noelle daughter arrives home, angry with her mother for moving out on another boyfriend without telling her. "I used to coming home alone," she shouts, "as long as I know where that is."

We are then safely in Salyes territory when he introduces several other supporting characters: including two women up from Seattle looking for a business opportunity (they reminded me of the nutcase Jack Nicholson picks up in Five Easy Pieces who wanted to go up to Alaska, looking for a new beginning), a local out of work fisherman, a pilot and the rest of the denizens of the local bar, The Golden Nugget. This is typical Sayles material; with several sensitively drawn characters, interlocking relationships, and pointed dialogue overlying a common theme (see Lone Star, Passion Fish, Matewan). But then the tycoon comes back blabbering some more, and you realize that this is not an examination of community and its workings, as Sayles previous films were, but of a community in a perpetual involuntary indecision. Their town is neither a frontier, a desolate wilderness nor a tourist metropolis, but on the way to becoming one of the three (most likely the latter). Joe, who has chosen not to be a fisherman for 25 years for a very good reason, has decided to take the boat out for the couple from Seattle. For Donna, this is a point where going north is just as well as going south. For her daughter, killing herself is just as well as staying alive. The whole place is in Limbo: a perpetual state of involuntary indecision. You can say that the film's second half is a manifestation of their state of mind.

Sayles is revered by independent film fans as a partisan of substantive cinema. He is essentially the anti Ridley Scott; making dense film while forsaking the opportunities of film as a visual medium. Since his collaboration with gifted cinematographer Haskel Wexler, his films, particularly 1994's The Secret of Roan Inish, have possessed a pleasing opulence. But he has himself admitted that he "is not interested in cinema as an art form but as medium to tell human stories". That is why the second half of Limbo, as brave and original as it is, suffers. With sluggish pacing and slow revelations, perhaps Sayles should have kept up with the rising adrenaline. I found myself enjoying the first half of the film, but only admiring the second.

Yet as a whole, Limbo is a rewarding and layered film. The more you think about its contentious ending, the more it accentuates the film's theme. Once you consider that if events come out when way of the other, then a state of Limbo no longer exists. An earlier, wry scene stresses this: Donna and Joe are walking by a lake where thousands of fish have been lodged ashore. The fish are struggling for their life, trying to make it back into the water, the make a tremendous splash. They are neither alive nor dead. But they could be either, given time. "I think they'll make it," says Donna. She smiles, and walks away without learning their fates.

Rating:
Summary: promising disappointment
Review: Patience may be a requisite for enjoying "Limbo," the latest opus from John Sayles, a filmmaker who always challenges the limits of commercial moviemaking and who values the art of storytelling in his films as much as visual design. His movies are not for all tastes, however, and much of his latest film seems languid and unfocused, even though it is filled with fine performances, beautiful majestic vistas of the Alaskan wilderness and an audacious assumption that the audience need not be "wowed" in the first fifteen minutes to ensure their continued interest.

As with most of his films, Sayles employs a novelistic approach, patiently gathering the strands of his story together as he introduces us to each of his various characters. Slowly, almost leisurely, we get to meet the people who occupy this Alaskan town as they take their place upon the canvas Sayles has painted. Some emerge as major players in the tale; some burst forth for a brief moment then recede to the background. The main characters include a former fisherman, guilt ridden by the deaths of two of his friends while on a boat outing and an aging club singer, desperately attempting to cope with a failing career, a succession of loser boyfriends, and a deeply troubled teenaged daughter who barely tolerates her mother and who abuses herself by cutting gashes into her arms as a cry for understanding and some stability in her life.

One of the problems with the narrative is that Sayles sets up a set of other characters and conflicts around these three main players, yet virtually drops them all when the three of them become stranded on an uninhabited island and the focus shifts entirely to them. Unfortunately, neither the singer, Donna De Angelo (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), nor her daughter, Noelle (Vanessa Martinez), nor, especially, the fisherman, Joe Gastineau (David Strathairn), are sufficiently interesting in themselves to carry the weight of the whole drama. What we lose is the richness provided by the Alaskan locals, be they fish canners suddenly left unemployed by the closing of a local plant, the tourist representative and the logging industry leader who clash over the age old issue of commerce vs. environment, or the endless stream of geriatric tourists drifting by in the background creating a surreal image for the foreground drama. These are the elements that rivet our attention and it is just these elements that evaporate in the second half of the film. The conventional family-relations drama we are left with provides insufficient compensation.

Special note should be taken, however, of Mastrantonio's finely fleshed out interpretation of a mother struggling to come to grips with a myriad of problems and frustrations and just trying to find some personal peace and fulfillment in her world. Strathairn, however, underplays his role so excessively that he often appears invisible in the film. As the daughter, Martinez is winning and effective.

The movie also tacks on a silly lady-or-the-tiger ending that, in the context of a more meaningful, daring film, might have been audacious and thoughtprovoking. Open-ended finales work well when they reflect some inner conflict that can not be fully resolved by a character. In this case, however, the toss-up ending merely involves a plot gimmick so it smacks of either last minute lack of inspiration or, (a more sinister possibility) simple authorial smugness.

All in all, "Limbo" emerges as one of John Sayles's lesser cinematic achievements.

Rating:
Summary: A quiet film that lingers in the heart.
Review: Not for everyone, this film. If you insist on tidy Hollywood-style endings, you should pass this one up. If, however, you enjoy a story that tells of the evolution of human relationships in extraordinary circumstances, and you're willing to reflect on a rather unconventional ending before passing judgement, give this one a try. The commentary by John Sayles seems refreshingly free of self-absorption, and only adds to the appreciation of his story-telling magic.

Rating:
Summary: Off-beat and complex human drama
Review: In this 1999 independent film, writer/director John Sayles has given us an off-beat and complex human drama set against the backdrop of modern Alaska where the tourist trade is replacing the cannery and every highway leads to the wilderness.

There's vivid cast of local characters whose lives intersect in a variety of ways, but the film finally focuses on Joe, a middle-aged local handyman with a tortured past, played with understated strength by David Strathairn. Mary Ellen Mastrantonio, the aging country-western singer is having a budding relationship with Joe. A fine actress, she has the ability to show every frustration of her life in a single glance. Vanessa Martinez is cast as her troubled teenage daughter, a deeply challenging role. As the characters get to know each other it looks like we're in for a simple romantic tale. But then things change and the plot takes a weird twist that thrusts them onto a deserted island with winter coming, little chance of escape and murderers after them.

All of the characters live in a state of limbo, either by their own particular psychological makeup and also by the physical circumstances around them. Alaska itself is a sort of character, the excellent cinematography always there but never intruding on the people. The pacing started slow but built in intensity and the last few scenes had me squirming and wondering how it would turn out. And then, in a conclusion that will forever ring with controversy throughout filmdom, the viewer is suddenly shocked and surprised.

This film is not for everybody. It teased me, played with my emotions, made me become one with the characters. Above all, it made me think. And I know I'll be thinking about it for a long time to come. I loved it.