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limbo
I don’t own Limbo, and every time I see it I wonder why I don’t. It was shot on location in Alaska, unlike many other films set in the glorious north, and the movie benefits from the authenticity. It’s lovely to look at. It’s also deceptive as hell. The movie kicks off in typical John Sayles style, introducing us to the locals. In one way or another, most of his movies revolve around a community. In Matewan, it’s a tightly-knit mining camp. In Lone Star, perhaps my favorite of Sayles’ films, it’s a border town full of long-timers and renegades. In Eight Men Out it’s a baseball team. In Limbo it’s the residents of Port Henry, Alaska, and he manages to capture the basic truth about Alaskans: they’re an unusual bunch. Living in a land that subjects you to nine months of harsh winter and absent daylight, gives you a three-month reprieve of sunlight around the clock, and then starts over again has different effects on different people. As one of the characters observes, when the winter’s been dragging on long enough, sometimes men kill each other out of boredom. But mostly, Alaskans have a history.
The characters are talking about a relationship gone sour, but they might as well be talking about how many people end up in Alaska, where ‘unforeseen circumstances’ is a familiar story. Sayles chooses three of these people and locks in hard on them: “Jumpin” Joe Gastineau (David Strathairn), a one-time high school basketball star and commercial fisherman who now makes a living doing odd jobs for the lesbian couple that recently moved to town; Donna D’Angelo (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), a washed-up lounge singer who lives from gig to gig, and is bottoming out at the Golden Nugget Saloon; and Donna’s daughter, Noelle (Vanessa Martinez), who pays the price for her mother’s taste in men and bad choices, and takes it out on herself. The supporting cast is populated with familiar characters — Kris Kristofferson is a Sayles regular, and the very underrated Leo Burmester (whom most people will remember as the grizzled mechanic in The Abyss) is a crackup. I said that the movie is deceptive as hell — what I mean is that until it’s over, it’s difficult to settle back and watch it comfortably, because it isn’t your typical movie. At first it appears to just be a story about a town, and a couple of people in it; then it appears to become a love story with a strange dynamic (Noelle has a crush on Joe, and is subsequently crushed when her mother ends up with him). This isn’t an unusual turn for a movie to take, but Sayles yanks the wheel hard to the left when you’re not expecting it, and the movie becomes something else entirely. At various times during the movie, Alaska is referred to as heaven; as hell; as purgatory. Not like purgatory, one character asserts: “Purgatory has an end. This is limbo.” But the title is more than a reference to a land as wild and uncertain as this; when you look a little deeper, an entire spectrum of metaphor reveals itself. Limbo is where Donna and her daughter live, looking endlessly for a little stability, for a home; it’s where Joe has lived since a boating accident twenty-five years earlier changed his life; it’s a state of being for scores of people who end up in places like Port Henry by accident, and can’t find their way out again. The movie has an ending that’s as challenging — and frustrating, possibly — as any I’ve seen. Watching it with Susan, I knew she’d either clap her hands in delight or launch herself off of the couch in anger. I can understand why some people get pissed-off when they see it, but it’s far from a cop-out. In the commentary, Sayles says that the story had no other possible ending, and once you give it a little thought, there’s no denying that he’s right. I’m a fiend for movies that end on the right note, and Limbo ends on a perfect one — with just enough echo that two days later you’re still thinking about it.
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