If there were an Oscar for ensemble acting, these two would win it hands down.
The Lighthouse
Grade: A
Director: Robert Eggers (The Witch)
Screenplay: Eggers, Max Eggers
Cast: Willem Dafoe (The Florida Project), Robert Pattinson (Good Time)
Rating: R
Runtime: 1 h 49 min
By: John DeSando
I can think of a guy friend or two who would drive me crazy if we were isolated on a lighthouse island for weeks on end. Such is the fate of a 19th -century older man, Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe), and younger, Ephraim Winslow (Rob Pattinson). So many literary themes arise from the many symbols and motifs that artistic enjoyment is like the inevitable storm—overpowering and beautiful.
As the simple story evolves, the taciturn Winslow must endure the endless stories and lies from the loquacious Thomas until he opens up his floodgates of hang ups and lies. From then forward the sea stories and personal challenges thrive until truth and fiction collide.
Meanwhile director/co-writer Robert Eggers lards his scenes with rich, sometimes Hitchcockian metaphors such as ravenous sea gulls and winding staircases, reminiscent of The Birds and Vertigo with identity and self-preservation the primary motifs. At one point each of the antagonists is called Tom/Tommy to reinforce the unknown forces similar inside each.
Present in almost every scene is the struggle to know the opponent and ultimately the self. As the two merge into a similar character, the outside world such as the gulls is impatient to open them up to fate and death.
Such is the power of personal narrative shared with a stranger to reveal a Darwinian arc that matches the dark passages in the world outside. While the two are descending into their own maelstrom, the world outside is raging in a classic Nor’easter to reinforce the need to protect themselves from it but the fate to bring the storm to themselves.
I’m exhausted just trying to explain the figurative foundations of this little island, but suffice it to say the Freudian implications, starting with the lighthouse and culminating in self-abuse with a carven mermaid idol, deserve to be deconstructed through subsequent viewings.
The Lighthouse is worth seeing again if only to recognize the dark side of human nature, emboldened by isolation and raging loneliness. The almost-boxed aspect ratio will convince even the skeptics of the narrow, inescapable burden of being human and the link with German expressionism, which showed in cinema the dark, imbalanced quality of being human even in the presence of blazing light.
If an Oscar for ensemble acting existed, Dafoe and Pattinson would have locked the award already.
Ephraim Winslow: “What made your last keeper leave?”
Thomas Wake: “He believed that there was some enchantment in the light. Went mad, he did.”
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
