All Is Lost (2013)

All Is Lost runs eighty-five minutes, employs one actor, and speaks fifty-one words. Robert Redford plays a nameless mariner whose sloop is opened by a drifting shipping container somewhere in the Indian Ocean. He patches the hull, pumps the bilge, climbs the mast, gets thrown overboard, loses the mast anyway, and trades the foundering boat for a life raft and a shrinking supply of fresh water. The screenplay offers no name, no family, no past. There is weather, competence, and the slow arithmetic of survival.

The usual apparatus of contemporary social concern is absent here, and the absence is total. There is no ensemble to diversify and no woman to consult. No community, no argument about who deserves what. The ocean holds no positions. When a container tumbles off a cargo ship, a viewer could read the moment as a comment on global commerce, but the film declines to make that comment. It requires a hole in a hull, and a container is a tidy way to make one. Anyone arriving in search of a sermon will leave hungry, and the film will not apologize for the empty plate.

This is not a deficiency. It is a classification. The politics of the film are the politics of rope and bucket, and its moral instruction extends no further than the observation that a man who fails to reef his sails in time will regret it. A film with fifty-one spoken words has no capacity for lecturing, which may be its quietest virtue. What remains is craft: Alex Ebert's score, the sound design, and the spectacle of a man in his late seventies performing his own water stunts. The vintage is austere. We taste salt, canvas, and mortality. We do not taste the decade that made it.