Other than a single shouted expletive toward the end of All Is Lost, the only words we hear from its central character — a sailor adrift alone on the Indian Ocean — come right at the beginning, in a note of apology to unknown recipients for unspecified sins.
That cryptic missive aside, the movie’s viscerally terrifying, weirdly ennobling language is all sight and sound. The sailor, known only as Our Man and played by Robert Redford, grunts and pants as he struggles to caulk a deep gash in his sailboat, inflicted by a stray cargo container that’s lost its ship and is littering the ocean with Chinese-made children’s sneakers.
Global capital bites back, perhaps. But as with several other plum films of this year’s Oscar season — Gravity, Captain Phillips — the elements will bite harder. Our Man takes a vicious beating from nature, and the wishful thought crossed my mind that the character might be Jeremy Irons’ brutally callous hedge fund manager from director J.C. Chandor’s previous film, the underappreciated Margin Call, back on the big screen to get his just deserts.
Not that Our Man is telling. We hear the creak of ropes and the gentle lapping of waves around his bunk. The whisper swells into a roar, accompanied by whistling wind as a storm bears down on his rudderless boat. Loudest of all is the deep silence that tells Our Man he’s all alone, his only compass an animal instinct to endure.