Reviewed by Peter Calder
***
Cast: Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, David Strathairn, Kris Kristofferson
Director: John Sayles
Limbo ambles onto the screen and into our hearts as vintage Sayles, a minutely observed character piece about people he soon gets us to care about as much as he obviously does.
Joe Gastineau (Strathairn is a Sayles
regular) is a fisherman home permanently from sea because he blames himself for a fatal accident which occurred under his captaincy. He's now the jack-of-all-trades in a fishing village near Juneau nestled between mountain and sea where traditional life (and employment) are under threat. He bumps into Donna De Angelo (Mastrantonio), a lounge-bar singer burdened with a bad romantic past and a sullen teenage daughter.
The relationship between these two, which moves from suspicious sparring to the tentative affection of the often-burned, rings with emotional verisimilitude. Strathairn and Mastrantonio give generous and unobtrusive performances (she sings all her own songs, and damn well too) which lends the arc of their romance a thrilling quality: we're desperate for it to work out, and worried that it won't.
Sayles has an excellent feel for the environment he's moving in (he hasn't had a surer sense of place since the wonderful Matewan) and we can almost smell the streets and bars where his camera takes us. But abruptly, jarringly, the story opens out: Joe's brother turns up with trouble on his tail and takes Joe and his instant family into the Alaskan wilderness. Their marooning makes the movie into little more than a Disney drama - and a plot thread involving Donna's daughter's aspirations as a writer is wan and forced.
An excellent half-film, Limbo leaves us too much in limbo with one of those make-up-your-own-mind-in-the-coffee-bar endings which was a cliche before it became fashionable in the 70s and is just plain irritating now. But it's a measure of Sayles' artistry that there's more to occupy us than in a dozen hours of multiplex mush.
