Ron Howard’s reputation as a Hollywood stalwart who crafted classy hits and middlebrow prestige pictures always masked where his true skills lay – in his ability to take larger-than-life characters and bounce them off one another. It’s why some of his films (The Missing, The Dilemma, Frost/Nixon, Night Shift, even those silly Dan Brown adaptations) are effectively buddy movies, sometimes secretly so. It’s also why he so often adapted true-life stories (Apollo 13, Cinderella Man, Thirteen Lives, [sigh] Hillbilly Elegy). Reality, or at least the semblance of reality, provided cover for his attraction to extreme personalities. As did his solid, glossy approach to craft: He built compelling, well-proportioned narratives around people who threatened to send the stories spinning in all sorts of nutty directions. He’s done the same with his new film, Eden, too. But this time, Howard — to his eternal credit — lets the craziness take over. He’s got a deserted island in the Galapagos, and five wild men and women to play off one another, each portrayed by an actor going full tilt.
The remarkable premise is, indeed, based on a true story. (We even get the obligatory closing credits footage of some of the real personages, though this time they don’t provoke oohs and aahs so much as bafflement that any of what we watched could ever have happened.) In 1929, as the world was reeling from financial and political chaos, Dr. Friedrich Ritter (Jude Law) and his wife Dore Strauch (Vanessa Kirby) decamped to the uninhabited island of Floreana in the Galapagos, he to create “a radical new philosophy that will save humanity from itself,†and she to provide moral support while trying to heal her multiple sclerosis. They might have shunned bourgeois society, but they were also eager to promote themselves. They sent letters abroad, and fantastical articles in German papers touted Ritter’s bold new experiment. And so, Eden begins in 1932, with the arrival of Heinz Wittmer (Daniel Bruhl), a World War I veteran, his wife Margret (Sydney Sweeney), and their son Harry (Jonathan Tittel) to Floreana, seeking paradise and a fresh start. What they find is an uninhabitable wilderness without fresh water, where wild hogs prey on anything one might try to grow, and stray dogs lurk everywhere, ready to pounce on the weak.
They also find that the embittered Ritter, for all his ambitions to make the world a better place and save humanity, really fucking hates people. He sends the guileless Wittmers off to live in a cave up a hill, hoping this will drive them away. Or maybe he thinks the struggle will cure what ails them. Ritter believes in agony. “What is the true meaning of life?†he asks in his work. “Pain. In pain we find truth. And in truth, salvation.†In fact, others’ suffering turns him on. After witnessing the early struggles of the Wittmers, Ritter and his wife hop into bed together, and Howard intercuts their lovemaking with Heinz Wittmer stumbling up a hill. We might begin to wonder if all this suffering is turning the director on, too.
One day, into the middle of this simmering standoff on the edge of nowhere enters the Baroness Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn (Ana de Armas), who arrives on the island with two hunky lovers (Feliz Kammerer and Toby Wallace) and a plan to build a luxury hotel for millionaires. She has elegant clothes, records, books, and not a clue about what she’s doing. If Ritter is a masochist and a sadist, Eloise is a pure hedonist. She’s also a narcissist and a neurotic. She pitches her tent right near the Wittmers’ home, so they can hear her furiously having sex with her boy toys at all times. She repeats to herself, “I am the embodiment of perfection,†as if trying to convince herself. We don’t know what her story really is; even her accent seems fake. And Armas plays her with live-wire unpredictability. We can never tell what Eloise will do next, whether she’ll demonstrate cruelty or compassion, whether she’ll seduce or attack. That uncertainty gives her an almost satanic power over the people around her, as well as over the viewer.
Uncharacteristically, Howard embraces the messiness of these people and the contradictions of their lives. Eloise might soon settle into a villainous role, and she is certainly manipulative, and a little mad, but she also inspires the Wittmers’ ill son to dream of freedom and a better life, as she herself probably once did. We see how vulnerable she is, which makes her both more captivating and more dangerous. Everybody else is on uncertain ground as well. We hear Ritter’s philosophical ramblings on the soundtrack, spoken in almost stentorian voiceover — but we also recognize that at least some of it is nonsense. At times, Ritter pauses, repeats and corrects himself, complains that what he just uttered was too much like Nietzsche, then tries anxiously to come up with something original to say. This man is no visionary; he’s just trying to make a name for himself. For all her outward support, his wife has clearly begun to have her doubts about her beloved prophet. Kirby, who is always so good at subtly slithering from one emotional extreme to another, here remains ever watchful, ever tense — we feel that she might be capable of great violence at all times.
Wittmer and his wife, who outwardly seem to be the wide eyed, mild-mannered audience surrogates stuck in the middle of all this nuttiness, get their own wild journeys as well. He, after all, is a man broken by the war — it’s the reason why they came here in the first place. Margret is young and impressionable (Dore calls her “a child bride†at first, erroneously) but she’s also pregnant, and watching her raw, snarling instincts start to take over the course of the film is one of Eden’s great pleasures. Sweeney, who was already put through the tortures of the damned in Immaculate earlier this year, again gets to play an innocent who discovers inner, almost mythical reserves of survival. She gets the film’s most gruesome, most intense set piece, about which the less said right now, the better.
The pressures of the untamed setting, combined with the inability of these characters to ever trust each other, results in an over-the-top melodrama that gets loopier as it goes on. But it pulls us along, too. There’s an earthy savagery at the heart of Eden that consumes not just the people onscreen but the people in the audience, too; our own bloodlust is provoked, as if to prove the point that there’s something rotten lurking in the hearts of all people. In the past, when he got close to something too dark and unhinged, Howard tended to pull back. He’s had some films, like In the Heart of the Sea, that needed to go a little crazier to work. With Eden, it seems, he’s finally allowed himself to lose his mind, and it might be the best decision he’s made in years.
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