Movies: Limbo

Then two things happen. The first is the appearance of Joe’s half-brother Bobby (Casey Siemaszko), all wheeler-dealer flash and filigree, and the other is Joe receiving the use of a fishing boat. The former is ominous enough when we are shown that Bobby has money problems and is ostensibly lying through his teeth about why he is there; the latter is also troubling when we learn that Joe hasn’t gone back into the water after having been responsible for the death of several shipmates. Bobby asks for a lift on the boat out to “meet some people”, and Joe makes the gross mistake of having the girls along as a way to get closer to both of them at once.

This part is difficult to talk about without ruining, because the way everything is played off ties so tightly into the movie’s real themes. There is trouble (about which I will say nothing specifically), and Joe and the two women find themselves stranded on one of the more remote Alaskan islands. They are scared, cold and wet, and even after doing their best to survive they find themselves facing the very real possibility that they will die out there. And then there are other developments, one of them involving Jack (Kris Kristofferson), a character with a great deal of submerged acrimony for Joe — developments which are designed to be read in more than one way, since they only make things all the more complex and troubled instead of closed-ended. Eventually we realize the question of whether or not they will survive has become trivial, and we’re faced with the much bigger and darker question of whether or not they deserve to survive.

One thing that’s consistent all the way through are the performances by all the leads. David Straithairn has long been an actor I’ve paid careful attention to in all of his roles — not because he’s flashy, but because he’s totally credible. Here he plays a man who is determined simply to stick to what he knows is the truth — mainly, that he does not know if they will be able to make it out there — and does his best not to create false hope among those who are only too happy to reach for it. I have a hard time seeing Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio without thinking of her headstrong role in The Abyss; here, she’s a little more nervous and vulnerable, and does a great job of giving us a woman who wants the best for her daughter without ever knowing exactly what that is — or, indeed, what her daughter is all about. This part is best shown in a subplot involving Noelle finding a diary in an abandoned cabin, one which seems clichéd on the face of it but ultimately develops huge and troubling implications for all involved.

Limbo has been described as a story about people discovering their insignificance in the face of nature, but that’s not really what it’s about, and I’m actually glad it’s not wholly about that — too many people have already tried to retell Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”, badly. Its real theme, I think, is how we build delusions for ourselves and others to cling to — that the Alaskan wilderness can be “tamed”, or that other people can be trusted if we look them deep in the eyes, or that we know what’s best for our children without ever testing that knowledge against them. What we do when those delusions fall through says more about what we are than anything else we do, and what we hide from other people for their own good behind those delusions may end up doing us all a great deal of harm.

To that end, the last leg of the film conceals one set of surprises inside another, which are far more startling than the usual plot twists you’d get. We are led to believe one thing after another about what will happen, and each of those beliefs (as illusory as the lies these people have spun for each others’ sakes) are demolished. And then there is the ending, which lives up to the movie’s title in the most all-encompassing way possible. For many people this is likely to be terribly frustrating, since Limbo starts off on a note that brings to mind a slightly more adult version of the TV show Northern Exposure — but it goes where it goes for very specific reasons. The more you think about it, the more you realize any other way to end this movie other than by diving headfirst into the void would have been a cheat.