The Light Between Oceans (2016)

A lighthouse keeper and his wife pull a dead man and a living infant from a rowboat off Western Australia, and rather than report the discovery they bury the stranger and keep the child. This is the entire moral engine of The Light Between Oceans, and it idles for two hours and twenty minutes while handsome people suffer in golden light. Derek Cianfrance, who once made Blue Valentine, here directs as though the camera itself has been sedated. Fassbender broods. Vikander weeps. Weisz arrives late to grieve with dignity. The Tasmanian and Otago coastlines do most of the acting, and they are excellent.

On the matter of social consciousness, the ledger is nearly blank, and this is not a complaint. The cast is uniformly white by the standards of 1920s Western Australia, which is to say honestly cast. A subplot touches on the hostility Hannah's German husband Franz faced after the Great War, a bit of period xenophobia that the film observes without converting into a sermon about anything current. Tom returns from the trenches hollowed out and silent; the film treats this as shell shock, not as an identity to be celebrated, which is the correct historical instinct. No one lectures us about money, the body, the planet, or the correct way to speak. Isabel wants a child with a ferocity that drives the plot and ruins several lives, which is agency of a sort, though the film's interest lies in maternal agony instead of anything resembling a thesis.

The picture is earnest, sincere, and slightly preposterous, and it tugs at the heartstrings with both hands until the strings fray. There is an audience for this, and it turned out in modest numbers before the thing vanished. The final scene, set in 1950, lands a decent blow. It is a melodrama wearing a nice coat, and no amount of coastal fog can disguise the machinery underneath. We have classified it. We move on.