Another Earth

critics:

5

Photo Gallery

The urgency given the looming titular planet of Mike Cahill's new film, Another Earth, is extinguished as quickly as the two major victims of the film's inciting incident. The term "victim" is taken loosely here, as the two people I am referring to, the son and pregnant wife of a talented composer, merely die when a drunk driver slams into their station wagon on the same night the eponymous globe is first spotted. Life for them is now of no consequence, but the two central figures of Cahill's film, the composer and the drunk driver, now live under the black veil of ceaseless grief, not to mention that docile orb in the sky that seems to only grow larger as the days pass by.

So the promise of this planet, christened Earth 2, and its mirror inhabitants is something of a bluff at first glance, as most of Another Earth plays out as chamber drama. This isn't exactly a bad thing: There's a certain mischief to hiding a gloomy two-hander inside an oversized science fiction premise like an inverted Kinder Egg, and anchoring premises of this sort to character development rather than story has often paid off. Thus, Another Earth focuses largely on the drunk driver, Rhoda (an exceptional Brit Marling), who, following the accident, emerges from her four-year prison sentence with little more than a room in her parents' home in New Haven. At one time a prospective MIT student, Rhoda now settles for scrubbing graffiti off the stalls in the boy's room at the local high school but the purpose of this newfound need to clean presents itself when Rhoda attempts to admit her actions to the composer, John (William Mapother, the murderer from In the Bedroom), and ends up becoming his house cleaner.

Constantly boozing, popping pills, addicted to his Nintendo Wii and living in squalor, John is quick to play a few rounds of Wii boxing and share an order of hot wings with Rhoda, but banishes her when she accidentally washes his late wife's cardigan. They warm to each other once more, however, and fall in love a bit hastily following a private concert in which John plays a piece on a musical saw for her. The melody he plays is eerily spot-on but the scene itself registers as hokey and predictable, especially considering the paint-by-numbers emotional development that subsequently builds up. The science-fiction angle allows for seemingly fresh structure: "I have a ticket to visit Earth 2" sounds a lot more interesting than "I have a job opportunity in Atkinson, Nebraska." Indeed, the most fascinating aspect that Earth 2 lends the film is the possibilities inherent in the film's haunting final moment. 

Cahill, who has seemingly overextended himself as director, editor, cinematographer and, along with Marling, co-writer of the film, attempts to open up the narrative a bit with the introduction of Rhoda's family and her blind co-worker (Wes Anderson axiom Kumar Pallana). These smaller interactions come off as slight and underdeveloped but they do offer a sense of fullness to the central relationship, which is the most effective facet of Cahill's film by a mile. The lack of an otherworldly mood is exchanged for a sense of dread palpably felt in the relationship between Marling and Mapother, though not fully realized in the director's digital aesthetic. The conviction Marling gives her role, particularly, makes for some intensely moving sequences but the attention given the half-developed  backstory adds slack to the dramatic tension; think about a similar indie, such as Urszula Antoniak's Nothing Personal, and consider the power it would have lost had the film's gripping focus wavered for even a moment. Cahill's ambitions are admirable, promising even, but Another Earth's appetite for invention and creation is far bigger than its proverbial stomach.