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Albatross: Overly Complicated & Heavy Handed

By Pam Glazier · January 16, 2012

 

Well, I just finished watching the film Albatross. I suppose, with a title like that, we should all just roll over and acknowledge the greatness of this film—anyone who can reference Coleridge demands it, right? (Especially when, as it was in this movie, the references are delivered so heavy handedly). It seems this film was intended to be a pithy statement about all of the figurative albatrosses that people have to deal with; a dramatic exploration about how people are weighted down by the expectations of others or themselves. But this message is lost because there are far too many components in this movie. And because this film was arranged as a sort of overly complicated ensemble piece, the audience doesn’t really get enough time with any one character to make that needed connection.

What follows is the long-winded and unnecessarily confusing intro of this film which serves as an example of what I am talking about.

Emelia (Jessica Brown Findlay) is a young girl who snubs authority. She buys liquor underage and she makes out with boys at her waitress job. She begins working at a bed and breakfast run by the writer Jonathan (Sebastian Koch) and his family. Emelia coaxes Jonathan’s daughter Beth (Felicity Jones) into more wild behavior just as she is about to take her college entrance exams. Beyond all of this is the fact that Jonathan takes an interest in Emelia because she is young, spunky, and because she admitted that she was working on writing a novel, just like Jonathan has been trying to do. His first novel, which he wrote 20 years previously, was a huge success and he’s been drowning in his own mediocrity ever since. Jonathan decides to secretly mentor Emelia. Perhaps this is a way for him to escape the stale realities of his own writings. A little ways into the film we learn that Emelia lives with her grandparents because her father left and her mother killed herself when he didn’t come back. Emelia is distantly related to Arthur Conan Doyle and has romantic dreams of becoming a writer just like him—just like her mother tried to do before she killed herself.

All of the characters are running from reality or desperately trying to change it. Jonathan cannot stand the fact that he’s a has-been, Beth is a bookish nerd who wants to let her wild side out, and Emelia chooses reckless activities as a way of dealing with the fact that her beloved grandmother is senile and dying—another person in her life who is going to leave her. The only person who seems to live in the present is Jonathan’s wife Joa (Julia Ormand) and she is constantly pissed off because everything sucks. She sees this most plainly out of all of this film’s characters.

A lot of time is spent setting all of this up, and so there isn’t time to develop the connections necessary to ensuring the emotional satisfaction of the audience when the supposed “pay-offs” happen. There are moments between Beth and Emelia, between Jonathan and Beth, between Emelia and her grandfather, between Jonathan and Joa—but they don’t pack any punch to them. They are boring. I had been desperately trying to follow the complex and meandering plot instead of simply feeling the characters strive for connection, and so it doesn’t really matter once they finally make that connection.

Much can be said about what the filmmakers were trying to say, but this movie had the same kind of problems that can be seen in One Day and in Judy Moody and the Not So Bummer Summer. Namely, that the movie was disjointed and felt more like a failed adaptation of a book as opposed to a film that could stand on its own. Don’t try to force all of your ideas into the tight time confines of a movie. Stick to the important stuff: the actual storyline of your main characters. Economize.

Also no matter what medium you’re in, please avoid heavy handed references delivered by “supposed to be cool” alt characters. It comes off as hipster-ish, and it detracts from the film.