PFS Film Review
Limbo


 

Beautiful Alaska is the location of Limbo, a film that features characters who have failed to succeed in the lower forty-eight states and have decided to try out the challenge of America’s last frontier. John Sayles, who wrote, directed, and edited Limbo, as usual selects a small town (here Port Henry, but actually Juneau) as the venue of his films so that we can see how humans negotiate their survival amid deep, often irreconcilable conflict. The heroine is Donna De Angelo (played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), a hedonist singer who shacks up with men for a while and then pulls out, but she drags along her teenage daughter Noelle (played by Vanessa Martinez). Noelle in turn longs for but is repeatedly denied stability, though she copes by writing fascinating short stories. As the film begins, we see exploited Filipino workers cleaning fish and waiting on tables at a party, a fat cat who struck it rich by greedily cutting down acres of remote virgin forests, reference to unemployment in both industries, and a cynical vision of the future of Alaska as a tourist mecca where the canneries and forests are the attractions. We even see quarreling Lesbians. Donna, having sung her last song with a band because she has decided to break up with a bandleader, asks for a ride from a man delivering wine to the party named Joe Gastineau (played by David Strathaim), who claims ingenuously that he had to give up a career as a pro basketball star because of an injury. Once in town, Donna bamboozles Joe into helping her to move her possessions from the bandleader’s apartment to a room over the nightclub where she will be performing. Soon, Donna finds herself so attracted to Joe that she wants to sleep with him on a boat trip up the Alaska coast with his half-brother Bobby (played by Casey Siemaszko). However, Bobby owes big money to drug dealers, and the secret purpose of the trip is to evade those trying to collect the debt. While the drug dealers catch up with the boat and kill Bobby, Donna, Noelle, and Joe swim to an uninhabited island, first hoping to avoid being shot and then desperate to be rescued before an approaching winter. Joe undertakes survival measures, including foodgathering and lighting a signal fire. Donna tries to find the bright side of a desperate situation, but ultimately experiences gloom. Noelle provides nightly entertainment by reciting a fascinating story, pretending that she is reading from a diary that she discovered in an abandoned hut; the line about life in Alaska as "limbo" comes from her lips as she imagines how another family would have suffered and died as fox trappers. Weeks pass before they are spotted by Smilin’ Jack (played by Kris Kristofferson), who has been hired by the drug dealers to find them but lack fuel to fly them back to civilization. As the film ends, a seaplane is in the air, the three awaiting either a rescue or death, and filmviewers walk out of the theatre wondering whether they were killed or rescued, hoping for a sequel to the story but aware that their death is more likely in an Alaska where the norm is that the rich will continue illegally and with impunity to defile nature and to exploit the poor. In short, Sayles is again a cinematic Michener who has chosen Alaska as the place to make the same point—that the rich are getting richer at the expense of everyone else because Americans are conditioned to disbelieve in the existence of a brutal class structure in the United States. But perhaps in Alaska, Sayles appears to say, the gap between rich is poor is presented in a more raw form than elsewhere. MH

I want to comment on this film

 
1