Terra Incognito

Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is one of the most beautiful - and underused - actresses in the movies. Her face is perfect; and the delight is, with her uncommonly wide and prominent cheekbones that fill the breadth of the screen regardless of her distance from the camera lens, that there's so much of it to admire. She alone made Robin Hood worth sitting through to the end, and her role in The Abyss helped make science fiction a genre safe for acting.

In Limbo, Mastrantonio plays Donna, a club singer whose career is as unsuccessful as her romances with men and her relationship with Noelle, her daughter. Donna's nomadic tour has taken her and Noelle to Juneau, Alaska, for a set of gigs in the local taverns. While performing at a wedding, the flighty dysfunctional singer announces to the guests that she's breaking up with her latest romance, the accordionist, and trounces offstage after finishing her last number. For the first third of the movie Mastrantonio creases and crinkles her faces to uncomfortably unpleasant result; when she does that, she's as unpleasant off the stage as Jennifer Jason Leigh was onstage in Georgia, and I worry her face will freeze that way.

The initial focus here is on Mastrantonio because she's new and awkward to John Sayles territory. While some moviemakers are pseudo-intellectuals, others are stand-up comics, and most of them are hacks, Sayles is above all else a free-lance writer and travel agent. In making his own independent movies (which he finances in part by doing screenplay grunt-work for Hollywood - if whoring one's talents was good enough for Faulkner and Fitzgerald, why can't Sayles get in on the action?) he combines both of these pursuits. For Sayles, the place is the thing; whether it's the Tex-Mex border in Lone Star, West Virginia in Matewan, or an unnamed (why?) Latin American country in Men With Guns, he has made a career out of providing us with coach flights out to disagreeable destinations and a bland paper-clipped novella/travelogue to read aloud on a dodgily self-guided walking tour. His films have only ever "looked" like movies, and I don't recall a moment from any of his works that are more embraceable as places in the mind and heart than places on a map or a story. In Truffaut/Hitchcock, surely the best film interview, a masterpiece is described as a creative work that "finds its form." John Sayles is a very good writer, but his pieces don't gravitate toward or yearn to be recorded on film. As far as directors go there is not much separating John Sayles and Kevin Smith.

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The long introduction is necessary because Limbo is not only the first real movie John Sayles has made, it's the best one that has been released this year to date, and will most likely - should - stay at the top of anyone's list through the end of the year. The first third of Limbo is off-kilter in part because Sayles has a happy dilemma - in having to direct Mastrantonio, who is just too radiant to be in a normal Sayles movie; and having Haskell Wexler, who is just too talented to be in a normal Sayles movie, as his director of photography - that he needs to resolve. Once the characters settle in, Limbo takes off. Sayles loyalist David Straithairn, who plays the Juneau lifer Joe (a former high school All-American basketball player - recruited by John Wooden, he was that good - whose injury resigned him to life as a townie), is fantastic as usual, and it's his calm presence that helps Mastrantonio adjust.

The movie starts out as standard Sayles fare: the region (Juneau, Alaska) and its denizens are introduced, but before everything settles down to an intolerably slow pace as in Lone Star, everything shifts. Joe, persuaded back into fishing twenty-five years after an accident that left two of his passengers drowned, takes Donna, Noelle and his half-brother Bobby for a boat cruise. Bobby's intentions for this trip are devious, and a turn of events results in them getting stranded on a frigid forest island. For the rest of the movie Joe, Donna and Noelle try to maintain warmth and sanity in an old cabin that fox-trapping settlers used to inhabit, and find a way to communicate their situation by fire. (If Hell is other people in a room with no exit, then Limbo is larger, prettier, and without a thermostat.)

The dialogue, clunky and resembling wisely crossed-out theatre scenes in the first part of the movie, improves greatly. While on the island a great chemistry develops between the three, and here Sayles' crafting of characters shines through. Once the familiar territory of Juneau is left behind, Wexler's photography, Sayles' writing and the cast's performances all merge seamlessly. Mastrantonio and Straitharn make a good onscreen couple, and in one of my favorite shots in the movie Donna smiles and wrinkles her nose at Joe exactly the way my ex- (a Romanian punk princess who looked exactly like Mastrantonio) used to.

Limbo is unexpectedly wonderful, which I think is the best kind. After having to sit through Sayles movies that seem largely funded by grants from the Advanced Placement U.S. History Council (such as Lone Star and Matewan, which I did indeed watch in my high school history class), the two or three major twists in the movie are absolutely perfect. One involves Noelle's discovery and reading of a journal in the old cabin, and the other is the ending itself. They may have come as surprises to other members of the audience, but I knew well in advance exactly what was about to come before they did. For the movie to have succeeded, these elements couldn't have happened any other way. The movie Limbo was too good not to be true.

Myron Santos
CineScene, 1999