Kangaroo

Rating: 9/10 (26 January 2017)

"Constantly talking isn't necessarily communicating," scoffs Jim Carrey's lovelorn protagonist in 2004's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He'd get right along with Amy Adams' linguistics specialist, Dr. Louise Brooks, from Denis Villeneuve's Arrival. Like Eternal Sunshine, it's a elegant, grounded but stylized portrait of grief and profound communication breakdowns amidst an almost-plausible science-fiction landscape. However, Villeneuve's film also makes its mark as one of the most haunting, introspective, and tautly, fiendishly clever films of the last several years.
Like most of the best sci-fi, Arrival is not really 'about' the aliens it introduces (don't worry, that's not a spoiler), but rather what they draw out in the humans whose lives they enigmatically appear in sans explanation. Their monolithic, oblong spaceships peppering the planet not only contribute to the pantheon of evocative sci-fi imagery, but also serve as handy ciphers for social commentary. To many, they're instantly a threat, or superfluous beyond their potential for extraterrestrial weaponization (or both), and there's a chortle to be had in how unsurprising it is the film plays out amidst the cradle of stifling U.S. military bureaucracy. But screenwriter Eric Heisserer also neatly weaves in the story of Dr. Brooks, anchoring the macro conflict on her own personal interactions with the aliens as a focal point and refuge from her own almost vegetative loneliness and grief. He and Villeneuve allow Brooks' own drama to teasingly dance amidst the global histrionics, with the key conflict not being the extraterrestrials demanding to be taken to our leader, but our wishing we shared the vocabulary to express such sentiments beyond the mysterious Rorschach test ink blots they spew, like union negotiations told through smoke rings.
Fittingly, in a film revolving around communication, Villeneuve is coy about showing his film's thematic and narrative hand too early. Planting firmly in the Close Encounters of the Third Kind school of mature, muted sci-fi, Villeneuve practically cackles with delight in exploiting every (good) trick in nonlinear storytelling book, using masterful editing to unspool wrinkles of story that carry unexpected waves of devastation and devastating hope. Here, Heisserer's screenplay is clever to a fault in its lean simplicity, finding power and poignancy in stark images (Brooks reveals that the Chinese military have been teaching the aliens to communicate through mah-jong, thereby establishing an inherently adversarial dynamic), with even certain lines that initially play as clunky instead proving to be red herrings, retroactively revealed as urgent clues and secret foreshadowing. It's unquestionably a slow-burner, with Villeneuve's pacing remaining firmly steady throughout, which, at times, grates against the brewing sociopolitical state of emergency, and a clinical feel that at times verges on excessively emotionally sterile. Still, the film's masterfully precise technical prowess alone makes the film worth viewing in cinemas. Bradford Young's dreamily gliding cinematography, composer Jóhann Jóhannsson's whimsically, playfully twinkling score, and some of the most unerringly spot-on sound editing in recent memory (to say nothing of the gorgeous scenic filming locations) all conflate to establish a blanket of eerie serenity amidst the global chaos. It's a fishbowl feeling that Villeneuve stirs from restlessness into deliberate claustrophobia in the final act, but, by gosh, if an audience is to be trapped in a fishbowl, it may as well be a fishbowl as beautiful as this.
Many leading actors working amidst such old-school sci-fi would have succumbed to the temptation to punch up the disquieting calmness with heavy-handed scene- stealing. Thankfully, Amy Adams is a far wiser and intuitive performer than that. Her work here is exceptional in its quietness, her subtle ebb of emotions throughout seeping into the viewer like a gentle rain flecked with the lightning surges of her perilously fleeting interactions with her daughter. She abjectly avoids any Oscar- baiting melodrama in favour of simply embodying Brooks like a comfortable slipper, making it one of the most affecting and truthful performances of a woman in pain we've seen in some time. Conversely, Jeremy Renner gives a sturdy performance throughout, but he's so bland and indistinct that his casting as a character too easily regulated to expositional fountain is instantly forgettable. Nonetheless, Forest Whitaker and Michael Stuhlbarg each excel at no-nonsense resonance as the commander and PR exec of the governing military, their strained and often contradictory grimness exposing the lion's share of social commentary.
"What is your purpose here?" is the guiding question for Brooks and her team. Arrival's is far less reticent. It's a story about a mother and her daughter. It's a story about a planet learning to listen. And it's a story about how time and love are the only truly reliable concepts, but not necessarily in that order. Like its depicted otherworldly visitors, Arrival is distinctly odd and discomfortingly tranquil, but stirringly mesmerizing, supremely clever, and surprisingly rewarding. Most of all, it's unassumingly unforgettable, and primed to take its place amidst the great science- fiction of the era.
-9/10