Movie review in the Friday, Aug. 5 Oregonian....
"Another Earth" is exasperating. It's an indie drama lightly garnished with a sci-fi conceit, and it desperately wants to say something profound about forgiveness and regret.
But in the telling, it's not much more than pretty, pretentious junk. It plays like the trite coffeehouse musings of a first-year philosophy undergrad. Its metaphors are heavy-handed, its main character is a blank, and the screenplay only manages to lightly smudge the surface of its Big Idea.
An alternate title for the film might be "The Worst Person in the World." A teen named Rhoda (current indie darling Brit Marling, who co-wrote with director Mike Cahill) gets accepted into MIT's astrophysics program, drinks at a party, drives carelessly, and rams into another car -- killing the woman and child inside but sparing the driver (William Mapother), a composer whose life subsequently derails.
Four years later, Rhoda gets out of prison; stares blankly into space in a number of icy and/or sun-dappled shots filled with dust motes; gets a job as the most tidily coveralled and least-convincing high-school custodian in cinema history; and becomes the composer's housecleaner under false pretenses. Rhoda keeps meaning to apologize, but instead infiltrates the poor guy's life in increasingly squicky ways.
And the movie, annoyingly, keeps asking us to root for her.
Oh, and on the day of the accident, through some unexplained quirk of physics, a mirror Earth appears in the sky, populated by duplicates of everyone on our Earth. This bizarre event -- which affects our tides not in the slightest, and barely impacts the movie's main drama -- is a Big Fat Unsubtle Metaphor for Second Chances and Lives Not Lived. I know this because "scientific experts" in the movie keep pointing this out on TV, mostly in the form of nonscientific rhetorical questions bordering on gibberish.
(Here's one sound bite, supposedly uttered by a major thinker: "The moment we first saw the other Earth was the first moment our synchronicity was broken." No way!)
The thematic explorations in "Another Earth" never go much deeper than those TV sound bites. Marling is a quiet presence onscreen (and I hear she's great in her other cowritten indie, "Sound of My Voice"), but her "torment" here is conveyed less by acting and more by oddly worshipful cinematography -- endless shots of Rhoda's long walks and middle-distance stares, plus one stagey suicide attempt in which she gets naked in the snow. Mapother does solid work, but his role exists largely to reflect Marling's. This becomes increasingly hard to stomach as the movie wears on.
Ultimately, I think that's what drove me nuts about "Another Earth": Everything in it -- from the storytelling to the monologues to the titular second globe hanging in the sky -- seems designed to shine a pretty light and/or linger moodily on the artfully distressed Rhoda, rather than digging deeply into her pain or the pain she's caused. (The movie doesn't even dig deeply into the ramifications of its sci-fi element; Earth 2 isn't much more than thematic window dressing, an offbeat selling point.) Men are mutilated for Rhoda's enlightenment; in fact, her fellow custodian (Kumar Pallana) literally mutilates himself between bouts of giving her saintly little nuggets of mystical-sounding life advice. The whole movie comes off, perversely, as a woe-is-me ego trip for its lead character.
"Another Earth" looks great, and I gather that Marling and Cahill squeezed a surprising amount of production value out of their tiny budget. But story-wise, this is a shallow exercise with arty trappings.
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(92 min., unrated, playing in Portland at Cinema 21) Grade: D
'Another Earth' (The Oregonian, Friday, Aug. 5, 2011)
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