Patricia Rozema--Into the Forest (2015)

I’ve loved some of director (and writer) Patricia Rozema’s works and that love started with I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing in the late 1980s and surged again with Mansfield Park (1999). Her writing for Grey Gardens (2009) was brilliant. I so wanted to love this one, which stars Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood as sisters who live with their father in a remote forested area. We don’t know why. The sisters are several years apart in age and are very unlike in every possible way: appearance, temperament, interests, talents, and stage of life. While Nell (Page) studies for the SAT, Eva (Wood), the elder by several years, prepares endlessly for her dance audition. Dad (Callum Keith Rennie) is a good-tempered, upbeat fellow who will not be in the film for very long.

One day a power outage hits the area, probably the whole continent, maybe the whole world. We never know. The family lives far from town and when they make one trip to the decimated grocery store and to the empty gas stations they have ominous encounters with some men who are either creepy, up to no good, or both. The characters themselves seem to be remarkably uninterested in what the problem is. First, it’s an inconvenience and as the outage stretches over weeks, months and then more than a year, it appears that the situation may be permanent.

The film is a character study with small and large moments of drama. It dwells on the ups and downs of the relationship between the sisters, how they deal with tragedy, how they deal with deprivation; their responses could hardly be more different. While Nell is practical, steady in temperament, and willing (to a degree) to figure out how best to act in the situation, Eva is quite the opposite. She is rarely anything other than self-centered, whiny, weak-willed and selfish. After a variety of bad things happen, Eva makes a decision that, depending on the viewer’s perspective, is either the ultimate in selfishness or a small vote for hope.

The film takes no interest in why or how the electrical outage has occurred because that’s not the story that’s being told. I applaud the novel choice to tell a big story through the experiences of just a handful of characters on a limited stage. There are no zombies, mutants or aliens in the film. For a film that focuses for the most part on the relationship between two people, though, its emotional tone and impact was far too muted.

We move from incident to incident. There are struggles between these two very different women over any number of things (let’s use one of our last gallons of gas to fire up the generator and listen to music for a few minutes; no, we have to save it for when we really need it) and there is one particularly hard-hitting moment of quietly devastating disappointment when they discover what might be a note left by their father. There are some decisions that seem to exist for their symbolic value and left me thinking, “You idiots!” When Nell decides to go along with a decision insisted upon by her sister at the end of the film, it’s clear she is giving in against her better judgment. For what it’s worth, I think it’s an awful decision too. Her sister’s (former) passivity seems to have shifted to Nell. Maybe she’s tired of doing every single thing and making every single decision that keeps them alive. Just a thought on my part, because neither the acting nor dialogue provide a clue. This ending, too, seems to be symbolic rather than natural, in the sense of flowing from the dynamics of both story and character. It simply does not seem to make sense.

The real problem for me was that while this was a character study, neither of the characters really had much depth. Their dynamics seemed very superficial and lacking in intensity where it was needed. I didn’t feel that the two actors were a match that ever felt natural or real. Character was built mostly from brief scenes of action and short scenes with dialogue. The film needed more dialogue to create greater complexity in the characters and their interactions.

I did enjoy the moody, nature-friendly photography of cinematographer Daniel Grant.

Rozema’s decision to focus on character is a gutsy choice and the existential situation provides an opportunity for some creative, unusual storytelling but ultimately she has little success. These characters need a lot more development and the narrative lacks both force and intensity that would draw in the viewer.