Arrival
I found myself disappointed but not surprised when I learned the results of the election last week. I did my best to wrangle how I was feeling and not throw my hands in the air, begging for a sign from the cosmos as to why I should believe in this country or more accurately, my fellow country men and women who chose a president I simply don’t understand. It wasn’t long before I found myself sitting in front of my movie shelf, as I often do in times in soul searching, selecting a few comfort entries to watch. The first was Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln for obvious reasons but as I finished and took stock of my selections I was surprised to find a trend in my choices. Everything else I picked was science fiction.
Over the last decade or so, I’ve seen the genre used not only to examine the power of space travel or a post-apocalyptic future but as a way to address common humanity more than futuristic adventure stories. I realized that that humanity was precisely what I was craving. My choices were the films Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian and the film I’m going to write about this week: Denis Villeneuve's ambitious and moving Arrival.
Arrival is more about grief, time, communication and compassion than it is warp speed, and it's a film that asks questions. How do we approach that which terrifies us? Why is it important to communicate through language and not action? The final act of Arrival gets to the big ideas of life that I won't spoil here, but viewers should know that Villeneuve's film is not a standard crowd-pleaser. It's a movie designed to simultaneously challenge viewers, move them and get them talking. It succeeds.
The early scenes have the stark, anxious clarity of a fable by Ray Bradbury; after learning of an apparent alien invasion from the Twitter-connected students in her advanced linguistics class – a wonderfully plausible bit of staging in which the surest sign that something big is happening is the dead silence of a dozen heads bent over their smartphones – Dr Louise Banks (the always perfect Amy Adams) is conscripted by the military to lead a delegation to one of the extraterrestrials’ spherical ships (a dozen of them are hovering menacingly in locations around the world).
Working with the military and a mathematician named Ian (Jeremy Renner), Louise seeks to find the answer to a very simple question: What do you want? The Heptapods as they're eventually called, speak in sounds that echo whale noises at times, but Louise quickly learns that written language is the way to communicate, even deciphering the complex way the interstellar visitors write. As she gets closer and closer to being able to convey that crucial question in a way that it (and its answer) will be understood, the world's uneasiness continues. Will man's protective instinct kick in before its science and language leaders can figure out a way to stop it?
This set-up closely resembles Villeneuve’s previous film, Sicario in that it takes a brilliant female protagonist and puts her in a situation that powerfully undermines her painstakingly acquired expertise. Lumbering around in a hazmat suit, Louise is miles outside her academic comfort zone and can’t use her vocabulary to keep feelings of fear and inadequacy at bay. Unlike Sicario, Arrival mostly lets its heroine hold her own, and in doing so gives Adams an actual character to play: few actresses are as adept at conveying a native intelligence without lapsing into brainiac caricature.
Louise also has darkness in her life. The opening scenes detail the birth, brief life and death of her child. I haven’t watched Arrival in a few years and these once familiar scenes hit me incredibly hard thanks to my own daughter’s lymphoma diagnosis 10 months ago. Watching Louise watch her daughter waste away connected to all manner of hospital machines is a feeling I know all too well. Thanking all that is holy my daughter Mattie is now in remission and on her way to recovery. Apologies for the bring down but I thought it important to include that detail of my life here because of where Arrival’s story takes us. Funnily enough my daughter reminds me more of Louise in this film than her lost daughter. Even when dealt one of the worst hands possible my daughter has pushed through it all and kept living. She wants to be strong. She wants to be useful. She is. We can all take a page from her book.
Throughout, Adams imbues Louise with a quiet, effective emotional undercurrent that's essential to the film's success. Villeneuve's vision is not particularly CGI-heavy, allowing Adams to work in a way that feels relatable. There's so much going on in this character's mind and heart, especially in the twisty final act, with which Adams could have "gone big," but it's actually one of the more subtle and internal sci-fi movie performances that I've ever seen. And it's a testament to the success of Arrival that it's her face—not the impressive alien ship/creature design—that people will remember.
As he always has, Villeneuve understands the importance of surrounding himself with talented people. In this case, two of the film's undeniable MVPs are cinematographer Bradford Young, the genius who shot Selma and A Most Violent Year and composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. The latter's compositions here are essential to every emotional beat of the film, defining the air of tension in the first half of the film and the moving undercurrents of the final act. Young's approach is beautifully tactile, using the natural world to make this unnatural story genuine. Young's imagery is fluid, unlike the choppy blockbuster cinematography that we're used to seeing in sci-fi. Most importantly, it feels like everything here is of one vision—cinematography, direction, acting, score, etc.—instead of the factory-produced blockbusters we've seen of late.
The inherent intellectual excitement of advanced cryptography keeps Arrival feeling awake and alert for most of its running time, and there’s a nice tingle to the filmmaking whenever the earthlings are airlifted to their arranged meeting place (once again, Villeneuve is great at dread filtered through awe)
The final thematically purposeful scenes of the film are stunningly ambitious and without spoiling the particulars of the plot I’ll just say that here is why I found I wanted to rewatch Arrival. The problem that ultimate needs solving in this film is approached from a global perspective with many countries around the world collaborating and demonstrating humanity at its absolute best.
This is ambitious, accomplished filmmaking that deserves an audience. It's a film that forces viewers to reconsider what makes us truly human, and the impact of grief on our existence. At its best, and largely through Adams' performance, the film proposes that we've all times in which communication breaks down and fear of the unknown sets in. And it is the best of us who persevere, get up from being knocked down and repair that which is broken. It carries a particularly poignant message for Americans right now.
