David O'ConnellRestless
November 29th 2011 01:57
Not even the wildly variable nature of director Gus Van Sant’s recent output can prepare you for the abject awfulness of Restless. And yet from the morass of this tedious, dithering, phony, featherweight drama, a beacon of light emerges in the form of the glowing Mia Wasikowska, the young Australian actress seen to best effect in The Kids Are All Right (2010) and Jane Eyre (2011). Her performance as a girl with a terminal disease rises above the material to showcase a potentially brilliant young actress - and one who deserves far better than Jason Lew’s pedestrian, emotionally bankrupt screenplay.
Poor Annabel Cotton (Wasikowska); as if her ridiculous name isn’t burdensome enough, she’s also forlornly trapped in a midday movie narrative: she’s the slightly weird girl who falls for another outsider in the even more absurdly named Enoch Brae (Henry Hopper). And what contrivance will bring these two eccentric creatures together? Funerals. Yep, Enoch likes to dress up in black and head out to random funerals just for kicks. Just the sort of activity you can imagine real people undertaking. Five minutes into Restless, you just know you’re going to hate it. With a passion.
Enoch shrugs off Annabel’s’ initial perky attempts to draw details from him but in a town the size of a football stadium there are only so many funerals per day so it hardly requires a private detective to track the inexplicably-deemed-curious Enoch down. She does and finds out his most endearing pastime is playing Battleship and conversing with Hiroshi (Ryo Kase), the ghost of a former Japanese kamikaze fighter pilot only he can see.
Aiming for sensitive portrayals of a young couple tentatively searching for their first definition of love, Restless (2011) ends up being cutesy, annoying and trite, though an occasionally blackly humorous attitude towards death is welcome. The names of the young lovers alone are like nails down a chalkboard. Hopper, the son of Dennis, overplays the dull quirks of his annoying character; he’s unbearable enough when in quirky suitor mode, but when asked to emote and externalise the conflicted feelings he has for Annabel and death in general, well, a string of frankly embarrassing scenes ensue, condemning the film to a slow and painful death.
This generic material is beneath Van Sant who humbles his reputation with this disease-of-the-week nonsense, a stolen-from-the bottom-of-the-Hallmark-unprod uced-screenplays-stack special. And yet despite the malaise that secures this film early on in a relentless clasp, there’s still Wasikowska to admire: radiant, ethereal but doomed to be underappreciated.
Restless opens in Australian cinemas on Thursday, December 1.
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