Butler's Cinema Scene

“All Is Lost” My rating: A- (Now showing)

106 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Among the many virtues of J.C. Chandor’s “All Is Lost” is this:  It may be one of the purest examples of cinema I’ve encountered in ages.

You could turn off the soundtrack and still understand exactly what is going on here.  Movies are about movement, after all,  and “All Is Lost” is a near-perfect example of visual storytelling.

Robert Redford, now 77, stars as our unnamed protagonist, the sole traveler on a well-equipped modern sailboat on the Indian Ocean.

We first see him awakening to the slosh of water in his cabin; he quickly discovers that his boat has been rammed by a floating container bin — one of those railway car-sized steel shoeboxes that evidently has fallen from the deck of a freighter. It has knocked a whole in the side of the sailor’s boat…and in a bit of ironic commentary, has left the sea littered with thousands of colorful running shoes that it held.

“All Is Lost” is the near-wordless story of what our man does to survive in a hostile environment. As such it bears no small resemblance to another much-ballyhooed current film on the same theme: “Gravity.”

But the fact is that “All Is Lost” is the superior film — less gimmicky, more believable, unbearably suspenseful and heartbreakingly sad.

There’s no back story about how Our Man (that’s how he’s listed in the credits) came to be alone on a boat in the middle of the ocean. Obviously he has enough money to indulge in big-league solo sailing. He may have a family — we first hear his voice reading a last will and testament that suggests he’s leaving loved ones behind — but no details are forthcoming.

Mostly “All Is Lost” is a grimly detailed chronicle of what he does to survive…for starters, using epoxy and fiberglass mesh to patch the hole. But it’s doubtful that his wounded ship will be a match for the typhoons that these waters stir up.

His radio and the boat’s electrical system are useless. There will be no call for help.

Despite setback after setback, Our Man grimly plods on. He jury rigs an evaporation system to produce fresh water. He fishes for food. He uses an astrolabe (it was stored deep in the bowels of his boat; in this high-tech era of global positioning, what modern sailor needs so cumbersome a tool?) to locate his position — and finds he is tantalizingly close to a major shipping lane.

Redford is the only human on the screen, and he is absolutely spectacular, giving us a fully rounded character without benefit of dialogue (O.K., he has one incredibly powerful bit of dialogue when he furiously screams a notorious Anglo-Saxon word at the sky). He’s no longer the pretty boy of his youth, but he’s as watchable as ever, and  now has a gravitas born of wrinkles and bleary eyes.

This is the story of a man who knows that he’s probably lost but stoically fights against that reality for as long as he can. It’s very powerful stuff.

Amazingly, this is only Chandra’s second movie. The first was “Margin Call,” a drama about the collapse of a big Wall Street financial institution. That film was rich in fantastic dialogue; it felt almost like a first-class stage play.

With this one he pulls a 180  — talk isn’t required to tell this tale.

Oh, and by the way, in an era when filmmakers seem not to know how to end their movies, “All Is Lost” has the perfect ending.

| Robert W. Butler