Monday, June 24, 2013

Islands in the Stream (1977)



          Actor George C. Scott and director Franklin J. Schaffner collaborated so effectively on Patton (1970) that it’s surprising they only worked together once more. And while their second picture is a much smaller endeavor than the duo’s celebrated military epic, Islands in the Stream is memorable in different ways. Adapted from Ernest Hemingway’s book of the same name, the picture takes place during World War II and details the exploits of Tom Hudson (Scott), an American sculptor living in the Caribbean. Separated from his old life—he left behind a bride and three children when relocating to the tropics—Tom is the quintessential Hemingway man’s man, an iconoclast driven by a code of honor few people can truly understand. Yet while some of Papa’s heroes express their individualism with battlefield courage and other such violent displays, Tom follows a more cerebral path. He’s all about beauty and truth, even if that means unmooring himself from society’s traditional expectations.
          Schaffner and screenwriter Dennie Bart Peticlerc transpose literary devices from the source material, including chapter breaks and voiceover, so Islands of the Stream is a bit self-consciously arty. Furthermore, because the voiceover features Scott sensitively reading Hemingway’s staccato prose, the movie alternates between visceral scenes between characters and internalized moments during which the juxtaposition of images and Scott’s monologues advances understanding, if not necessarily the storyline. In other words, Islands in the Stream is an offbeat hybrid of full-blooded drama and novelistic rumination. Both elements work, to different degrees.
          The best of the fully dramatized material involves Tom’s fraught relationships with his estranged wife, Audrey (Claire Bloom), and his sons, particularly young adult Tom Jr. (Hart Bochner), in whom the hero finds a kindred spirit. (A poignant sequence revolves around Tom meeting his children for the first time and taking them on a grueling fishing trip.) The best of the purely literary material arrives at the very end of the picture, when Schaffner finds just the right images to accentuate the segment of Scott’s voiceover that contains his character’s closing thoughts after experiencing loneliness, loss, and a kind of redemption.
          The movie has significant flaws, not least of which is an episodic structure that impedes the building of proper dramatic momentum, but the elegance of Schaffner’s execution covers a multitude of sins. More importantly, Scott is at his very best—which is to say that his work is very near the pinnacle of American screen acting. Suppressing his natural tendency toward bluster in order to channel a character who keeps most of his feelings hidden, Scott conveys pain and regret while still illustrating the subtle idea that Tom Hudson considers each man’s life a work of art. So even if the movie’s penultimate passage, a long discursion into high-seas wartime adventure, stretches credibility and dilutes the impact of the film’s touching family-ties material, that’s a minor complaint. After all, it wouldn’t really be Hemingway without at least some hairy-chested excess.

Islands in the Stream: GROOVY

4 comments:

  1. A bit dull at times and as you say offbeat, but a great film nonetheless thanks to the combo of Hemingway's material and Scott. This is truly one of Scott's shining moments. I also love the performance by David Hemmings as his alcoholic ship-mate. Oscar worthy.

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  2. It's been twenty-five years since I saw it but I remember going to the theater when it was first out. Maybe ten years later I saw it again on cable and thought it was excellent. I plan on finding it again and renewing my enjoyment.

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  3. Paramount was convinced that this was one of their their epic and classy Oscar "big guns" for 1977, but fate would deliver an unforeseen and shocking blow to their musty old executive-suite assumptions that year: a film they barely had a sliver of respect for(in fact outright detested) described in their words as a "vulgar little embarrassment" turned out to be not only the critical and box-office sensation of that winter, but transcended it's own cultural moment to become one the key classic American films of the decade, if not the entire American 2Oth century cinematic canon itself. ("Saturday Night Fever")

    It does once again prove Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman's most famous show business adage: "No one in Hollywood knows anything."

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  4. One of the great voice over lines in the film comes from For Whom the Bells Toll, which loosely says: There is no one truth - it's all true.

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