Rich Dudes With Boats

All Is Lost, Louis CK and empathy

It’s a bit difficult to write about a film like All Is Lost, one that is so quiet and single-minded, but as it rattles around in my head weeks later I find it helpful to explain some of the lenses through which I view the film.

First there’s this from Armond White, on the response of some critics to the films of Whit Stillman and Wes Anderson:

They complain that it’s a film about white people, just about white
people. Oh, now you’re concerned about “just about white people”? What about when 90% of the movies that come out there are only about white people, that’s okay. When they finally get a filmmaker who understands what race and class mean, they complain. Actually let me put it better: When they get a filmmaker who understands what white privilege means, then they complain. Filmmakers who just accept white privilege as the natural order, that’s fine. Let’s celebrate that and throw some Oscars at it.

…

“White boy.” That’s not a criticism of Wes Anderson and Whit Stillman. They understand the white world. You think they understand that Ron Howard is a white boy? That Steven Soderbergh is a white boy? They don’t even think about that.

Steven Boone elaborates:

Condescension works both ways—up and down…It’s so cool that White, a son of old school, working-class Detroit, could develop the sensitivity to distinguish between the hollow falsity of American movies that claim to ignore class barriers (but really just ignore the underclass) and the transcendence of filmmakers like Anderson, who sing that nobody can help what they’re born into; that most of us mean well; that affluence earned or inherited weighs upon the soul as heavily as poverty.

Now contrast the empathy of White and Boone with this recent performance of working class solidarity from Louis CK. Most of the buzz surrounding this interview came from CK’s comedian-informed observations about the physics of Gravity, but he followed up with some sailboat-owner-informed criticism of All Is Lost that bears further discussion. CK begins with a romantic recounting of his own recent boat trip up the Hudson River, much to the delight of his aspirational interviewers, which springs him into an extended harangue of Redford’s “piece of shit” film (roughly transcribed to eliminate frequent cross-chatter):

He’s a fuckin asshole, I was screaming at the screen the whole movie because he tries the radio for like a minute, and then he’s like “eh.” Also you don’t just hail your “this is my fuckin ship’s name,” nobody gives a shit. MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY — I’d be falling asleep with my hand on the switch saying “mayday,” because if somebody hears “mayday” slightly, these VHF radios have a limited radius, so if somebody hears “mayday” they know “within five miles of me somebody’s in trouble,” and there’d be helicopters swarming.

…

I have on my boat — I mean [Redford’s character is] some kind of a jillionaire — I have on my boat this plastic, looks like a Fisher Price thing. Everybody that comes on my boat, I tell them “if we’re sinking, grab this, press this one big red button, and don’t let go. If you press that button, fuckin people will come and find the button. It’s water-sealed, it’s impervious to anything, costs about — well, [Redford’s character] can’t afford it — it’s like a subscription of about twenty dollars a year.

See, he’s exposing how hollow Redford’s conceit is — anyone who knows anything about boating knows that the whole plot of All Is Lost could be easily resolved. Redford is pulling one over on us rubes, banking on our lack of knowledge of the finer things to sell his ridiculous plot. But CK steps from behind the curtain to give the trick away.

Anyone familiar with CK’s stand-up has seen plenty of this kind of thing as his wealth and fame has increased — whether it’s an anecdote about all the other awful people flying first class, or another thing about the creepy neighbors at his swanky new Upper West Side digs, CK gets considerable mileage from this average-joe-infiltrating-the-upper-decks schtick. It’s almost as if, in absence of anything resembling income equality, we (and I include myself in this “we”, I laugh at Louie’s stuff) are willing to settle for one of our own getting in there to mix it up a bit. Not that it’s necessarily a zero-sum game, but people certainly seem to treat CK’s success as a big win for the little guy. I suppose there’s some satisfaction in hearing our suspicions confirmed, but that only takes us so far. At the end of the day, CK’s apparent neurosis doesn’t make me hate his wealth any less than I hate Redford’s.

The other lens through which I view Redford’s film is this news story, in which Redford announces his intention to leave his beloved Sundance Film Festival, lamenting its decline into a vapid hype machine:

Redford said he felt increasingly hostile towards the corporate and marketing forces that had inevitably permeated the festival in recent decades.

Redford, who no longer oversees selection of films for the event but remains president of the board and consults regularly with programmers, said: “How can I not be satisfied about a success? But those earlier years felt best.

“They’re taking away some of the textures and qualities that were here that gave it a kind of intimacy. It’s no longer the place it was. I don’t like what’s happened.”

While Redford isn’t credited as a writer or director on All Is Lost, it’s always reasonable to assume that a movie star of his stature and with his own deep directing background calls a fair amount of shots on this kind of project, especially one where he’s the only actor on screen, so as I look at what the film is, I keep the Sundance context in mind.

We have a wealthy man who has failed to hold something together. He wasn’t prepared, but even barring that perhaps he was just congenitally inadequate to the task. Not only has he failed at the task, but the task itself may very well be illegitimate, an exercise in vanity and privilege, hardly worth the effort and resources it sucked up. He’s paralyzed with regret, incompetent and tired. At his age, he only has a few years left, years that will be increasingly difficult no matter what he does, but something compels him to continue — to scramble in the dark for another solution, another way forward.

As I’ve said before, when confronted with a demonstration of privilege, not everyone needs to reflect, but certainly many of us do, as it’s apparent to me that Redford does himself. When we look at All Is Lost, we can see the character from a distance, as a rich idiot who goes and gets himself shipwrecked on some pointless quest, and we can also empathize with his failure, and his ignorance. We can observe the distance between his dream and his reality, lamenting the loss of the dream while mercilessly inventorying the missteps that led him there. I would look askance at anyone who says we have to choose one or the other — they might be trying to sell us something.