Not since Lord of the Flies or Mosquito Coast has a director captured as well as Ron Howard the horror of living outside civilization in a natural world fraught with danger—mostly from themselves. From the likes of Da Vinci to Pavarotti, this is not the Howard we have known—it may be better, even if he has hitherto had little sex and animal slaughter, much less male frontal nudity—yikes.
I must give it to writer/director Ron Howard, his Eden is anything but a paradise, and his historical drama unlike any of his other films. It’s more depressing than any of his I can think of, and his characters so unlikable that identification with them is low. Yet, at the same time it is such an absorbing dark drama that audience might question if the film has the literary legs of, say, Lord of the Flies.
Dr. Frederich Ritter (Jude Law), a German physician, in 1929 settles on the isolated island of Floreana, in Ecuador’s Galapagos Archipelago. The world economy after WWI has tanked, so he and his wife, Dore (Vanessa Kirby), go it alone until they are not. Howard takes us through the steps of real-life adventurers accommodating themselves to newcomers, who bring the troubles Ritter and Dore thought they left behind.
It would be easy to attribute the thematic underpinning to an allegory about Darwin’s “survival of the fittest,” but there’s more here having to do with the power of possession and sex, especially when the Baroness (Ana de Armas) arrives to cause mayhem that civilization nurtured to madness not on these secluded islands but everywhere.
Ron Howard’s Eden is a challenge to the aud to figure out if they could survive any better than the film’s principals. For us nerds, the challenge is to absorb all the hints that civilization is screwed no matter where it relocates. Eden is a myth, so get a plan that might work.
Director: Ron Howard (Apollo 13)
Screenplay: Howard, Noah Pink (Tetris)
Cast: Jude Law (Closer), Ana de Armas (Ballerina)
Rating: R
Length: 2h 9m
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts NPR’s It’s Movie Time and Cinema Classics as well as podcasts Back Talk and Double Take (recently listed by Feedspot as two of the ten best NPR Movie Podcasts) out of WCBE 90.5 FM, Columbus, Ohio. Contact him at JohnDeSando52@gmail.com