| Weight
of Water: Vengeance from Beyond the Grave?
So,
is this cross-temporal drama a ghost story?
It
features dual narratives: one tracing events that led
to a double murder committed 100 years previously; the
other, in the present, involving a photojournalist (Jean
Janes) returning to the island where the murders took
place, in order to research a feature article on them.
The photojournalist (Catherine McCormack) is accompanied
by her husband (a Pulitzer-prize winning poet, Thomas
Janes, played with suitably melancholic affectation
by Sean Penn), her brother-in-law, Rich, and her brother-in-law's
sexually provocative new girlfriend, Adaline (Elizabeth
Hurley). Underlying inadequacies in the journalist's
relationship with her husband create tensions that increasingly
find a form of expression in the unraveling details
of the murder. Thematically, events in both past and
present resonate with repressed emotion, guilt and sexual
longing.
The
fact that both narratives centre to some degree around
the murders -- and hence place the present against a
rather gothic past -- creates the perfect literary milieu
for a ghost story. As understanding of the historic
events becomes more and more detailed and the emotions
that precipitated them become, in a way, less resolved,
the increasing tension and sense of violence they generate
seems almost to bring out the tensions between the characters
in the present -- as though the past is haunting the
present and using the inevitability of the poet-husband's
death as a form of resolution to both stories ("An
obsession that refuses to die" says the tag-line
on the DVD cover). The connection between the two time
periods is a cinematic one; there comes a point where
the imperatives of narrative alone exert an apparent
influence from past to present and insist on bringing
the two stories together. Rapid intercutting between
past and present ensures this, as emotions reach a climax
in both time-frames concurrently. It is as though the
one causes the other.
Arguably,
of course, such a "haunting" doesn't operate
on an "objective" or rational level within
the film; its reality is purely artistic, driven by
technical synchronicities. But it operates nevertheless,
and it is this irrational connection that gives us a
lingering sense that something supernatural has occurred,
though on an objective level within the narrative it
hasn't.
Director
Kathryn Bigelow creates various cinematic connections
that reinforce the sense of inter-relationship between
people and events -- and give a supernatural aftertaste
to the film. Penn's poet is suffering from guilt over
a drunken car accident in the past -- an accident that
caused the death of a young girl, his love at that time.
This guilt has fed into his poetry and given it an obsessive
force. His brother's new girlfriend, Adaline, who provokes
him sexually and bonds with him through fascination
for his poetry (and its expression of tragic loss),
causes his death when she plunges into the storm-wracked
sea and he leaps in to save her. Curiously, in a flashback
to the car accident that has defined the poet's life
and work, the girlfriend is played by Hurley. It is
only a momentary glimpse, but the effect is to forge
a connection between this long dead girl and Adaline
in the present -- as though, perchance, the one is a
reincarnation of the other. Has the dead girl returned
to exact revenge? On a naturalistic level, of course,
the flashback can be seen as taking form from photojournalist
Jean's jealousy of Adaline -- it is Jean who is telling
the story of the accident and she is more than conscious
of provocative Adaline's allure for her husband; visualising
the dead girl in terms of the current sexual "obsession"
is no great stretch.
Bigelow further reinforces the cross-temporal connection
between the two through a necklace Adaline is wearing.
The dead girl had worn a similar ornament (though, again,
the fact that Adaline is wearing one may simply
indicate her familiarity and obsession with the famous
poet's work). During the watery climax, as Adaline falls
into the sea (and is allowed to do so by Jean who realises
what is to happen and does not intervene -- a scene
that immediately cuts to the horrific violence of the
historical murder), Bigelow gives us a close shot of
the necklace floating into the depths. The effect of
this is to grant it an almost talismanic quality. Shortly
afterwards, Thomas leaps in to save Adaline and is subsequently
lost. It is as though his guilt has made him aware of
the connection between past love and current attraction,
and this is an act of atonement. The necklace, symbolising
the tragedy of the girl's death, disappears into the
darkness beneath the weight of water.
But
that is not the least of it. The extended climax is
a complex interweaving of images that serve to created
connections between all the stories we have been following.
Anger, jealousy, frustration, guilt -- these are all
connected across time by various juxtapositionings.
Jean herself leaps into the sea in a futile attempt
to help her husband and as she sinks into the water
she is confronted first by the most innocent victim
of the historical murders -- and then, more threateningly,
by the murderer herself. Both are floating there, eyes
open and aware, like living corpses, representing aspects
of what she is experiencing now herself. This, too,
is an ambiguously supernatural occurrence -- clearly
the two figures are to be taken as subjective manifestations
-- but their presence emphasises the possibility of
an influence across time, or at least the continuity
and continual re-emergence of the central passions of
the film... like a ghost reaching out from the past.
Fate, supernatural revenge, ghostly possession: all
these common elements of the ghost story are present
by suggestion, though none of them are ever confirmed
beyond the technical connections made.
Many
effective ghost stories refuse to resolve the central
uncertainty as to whether the events depicted are real
or subjective. Perhaps it is in the nature of ghosts
to be ambiguous. At any rate, though interpretation
of Weight of Water must lean toward
psychological explanations for its events (because the
connections remain part of the film maker's technique
rather than arising from the plot itself), the final
effect of watching it is, for me, that of watching a
ghost story... and that's how I'll choose to classify
it on my DVD shelves.
But
is this a "good" film? Well, I think it works
very effectively -- for me, it was engaging, often beautiful
and of considerable power, despite the difficulties
of its resolution... which merely gave me an incentive
to re-view it. Admittedly the historical story is the
most powerful part, but that doesn't need to take away
from the narrative effectiveness of the "frame"
itself.
|
WEIGHT
OF WATER |
