Another Earth: Cosmic Doppelgänger

“If you met yourself, what would you say?”

It is a perplexingly poetic question to ponder, and an equally ambitious one around which to conceive a film.  Yet Mike Cahill aims to accomplish exactly this with his narrative feature debut, Another Earth, the inspiringly low-budget, high-zeal indie – produced, co-written, directed, shot, and edited (including special effects) by Cahill with a meager $200k – that walked away with the prestigious Alfred P. Sloan and Special Jury Prizes (and Grand Jury Prize nomination) at Sundance earlier this year.  The film infuses enough sci-fi within the premise to present the aforementioned question as a tangible possibility while the characters, cogently grounded in the familiar emotions that so often plague us, compel us to search with them for the answer.

While driving home from a party, Rhoda Williams (co-writer Brit Marling), recently accepted to MIT’s astrophysics program, hears on the radio that another Earth has been discovered, an exact duplicate of our own planet lying somewhere just beyond Pluto.  Rhoda leans her head out the window, gazing up at a bright blue star in the sky.  So submerged in inebriated wonder, she does not see the stationary sedan at the stoplight until after colliding into it, at which point the pregnant mother and her son are already dead; the husband, John Burroughs (William Mapother), already slipping into a coma.

Four years later, Rhoda departs from prison a shell of her former self.  Guilt has afflicted all of our lives at one point or another, but nothing like this, and Marling brilliantly embodies the torment of her character, isolated in her quietly suicidal suffocation.  The performances by both Marling and Burroughs sufficiently carry the mildly contrived romantic narrative that unfolds between them – Rhoda, unable to follow through on her plan to reveal herself to John as the one responsible for his family’s death, poses as a cleaning service, spawning an attraction that grows out of their mutual sense of solitude while Rhoda’s dark secret lingers below the surface.

Of course the vaguely familiar relationship narrative between John and Rhoda is not meant to uphold on its own.  This plotline merely provides a framework for Cahill to indulge in the speculative philosophy of the premise itself, through which these near-platitudes of plot provide a necessary function within the poetry of the piece as a whole.

Cahill captures the narrative universe with unsaturated blue hues and an often-shaky hand, allowing moments of flawlessly composed beauty to linger across the silver screen between chunks of gritty documentary-style footage.  The orbit of Earth 2 has brought it close enough to Earth that we can make out the swirling clouds and continental contours as it lingers like an epic blue sun in the sky, and the image is often breathtaking.  We can sense that as Rhoda gazes up at this carbon copy of her own home, she feels no less connected to this planet as she does her own.

Rhoda submits an essay to win a ticket for the first voyage to Earth 2, the only civilian passenger position in an otherwise normal crew.  While the need to escape to a new home stimulates her initial interest, the true existential kicker comes when a news anchor aiming to achieve first contact with Earth 2 discovers that she’s made first contact with herself.  Richard Berendzen, the scientist and author who functions as a narrator of sorts, delivering existential divulgence with a dry and aged yet sincere tone that brilliantly accompanies Cahill’s more cinematic moments, explains the significance of this discovery:

“In the grand history of the cosmos, more than thirteen thousand million years old, our Earth is replicated elsewhere.  There’s another you out there.  Now you begin to wonder: ‘Have they made the same mistakes I’ve made; and is that me better than this me?’”

It’s an utterly profound premise and question, the type of movie that compels you to remain in your seat throughout the credits, not necessarily for the sake of reading through them, but to give yourself time to digest the maelstrom of thoughts flowing through your head.  As I stated before, the twists of plot are not necessarily as mind-boggling as the premise would suggest, and the narrative, though satisfying enough in its progression, carefully tip-toes along the boundaries of banality and brilliance.  Though flawed, it may be, this is one of those films where ambition overshadows the outcome, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Like all philosophy, Another Earth does not aim to fully answer every question it presents, and nor should it; because the true value of such a film is that it asks these questions at all, an accomplishment we too rarely find in cinema today.