Owen Gleiberman, film critic for Variety, describes Wim Wenders’ newest film, Submergence, as “an arthouse weeper.” If Wenders wanted me to cry,
he should probably learn how to write a better female character, and then offer
his audience a story that does her and the rest of his cast justice. (Warning: spoilers and snark to follow.)
Submergence is the
story of James, a spy, and Danny, a bio-mathematician who studies the ocean
(please do not call her an oceanographer; if you do, she will glare at you),
who meet and fall in love while on vacation in Normandy. James is on vacation
because he’s undercover as a water engineer from Nairobi and is about to
undertake a top-secret mission in jihadist-overrun Somalia. Danny is on
vacation because she’s about to set off on an expedition that will take her
deep beneath the Greenland Sea in a tiny submersible, where she will explore
the origins of life on our planet. (A remote part of Normandy is apparently the
place to be right before one goes on a months-long, potentially dangerous
mission/expedition.) James’ eventual goal is to locate a particularly nasty
jihadist thought to be in Somalia and to help take him out of the picture,
forever. Danny’s goal is to be featured on the cover of Nature. (Danny has already fallen behind on the character
likeability scale at this point.)
After a brief initial encounter on the beach, James’ brash Scots
charisma is so fascinating to Danny the driven scientist that, when they meet
again in the hotel lobby, she immediately agrees to have lunch with him. Then
she gets back to work and apparently forgets all about him. James manages to
remind her that they have a date, and lunch goes well, despite Danny being too
busy to even look at her lunch (two forlorn oranges) because she is telling
James all about the five levels of the ocean while he has his eyes closed. (This
woman does not need food; she is apparently quite literally sustained by passion
for her work.) Unfortunately, since everything James has to say about himself
is essentially a lie (per the spy thing), his only meaningful contribution to
their conversation is to ask Danny if she ever worries about dying in the event
something were to go wrong with the submersible and she gets stuck under the
ocean. (Foreshadowing, anyone?) This initial tactlessness, which in addition to
various later comments that make you think James might actually be something of
an asshole (or possibly a gentleman in disguise trying to let Danny get ahead
with the audience), is evidently a huge turn on for Danny. We assume this because
she not only continues to spend time with him, but abandons her normal practice
of never seeing anyone the morning after a hook up. This, she tells James, is
because she always kicks the guy out after sex and then gets right back to work.
James is now besotted.
Over the next few days, Danny’s work continues to get the
push in favor of delightful interactions with James in a hotel with no guests
(after the lunch date dining room scene) and no staff (after we meet a single
bar tender the first day). Meanwhile James’ continued passion for Danny is evidently
due to her very sexy glasses, which she sometimes wears on a cord around her
neck (when she isn’t fiddling with them or wearing them in order to convince us
she’s a very intelligent scientist), and her penchant for ripping off her
clothes to jump into freezing cold sea water. Finally, James must depart
Normandy. After they declare their undying commitment to one another, however,
he is almost tempted to abandon his mission (a mere three-hundred meters into
his journey) when Danny calls him to tell him how much she misses him. Not
knowing that he’s really headed to Somalia to fight terrorists, Danny insists
that he shouldn’t turn around, and off James goes. Needless to say, things do
not go well for him in Somalia, pretty much from the moment he lands.
As a love story, the success of Act Two depends mainly on the
degree to which you have come to believe in the profound love and special
connection these two people supposedly share. This is because the rest of the
film attempts to set up the now separate James and Danny story lines as both parallel
and equal in emotional weight. This approach could have worked. But it doesn’t.
Instead, the film works very hard to make us believe that both characters are
experiencing the same degree of torment, even though there is simply no
comparison between the two characters’ situations. Danny’s situation isn’t even
particularly convincing.
On the one hand, we have James,
who has only his love for Danny to keep himself sane during weeks of captivity
and physical torture that could end in his death at any moment. On the other,
we have Danny, who never really gets her work mojo back and instead suffers the
emotional torture of not hearing anything from James despite the two hundred
messages she has left on his voicemail. Never mind that it would be more believable
if she, too, were largely out of touch. She is on a boat, after all, in the
middle of the ocean, on her way to the Greenland Sea in order to pursue her
dream of being on the cover of Nature.
Never mind that James could have given her a stronger indication that his job
could take him out of cell range for a period of days or even weeks without
doing undue damage to his cover. They might even have agreed to hold off on
communication until her project is finished and she is back on land. Instead,
we get a woman who has become unhinged by the fear that a man she has known for
a matter of days might have dumped her. She’s so out of it that she drops a test tube and her male colleague
has to remind her (with an unbelievably creepy and emotionally manipulative
speech) to get it together.
Later, the inevitable scene in which her submersible does
indeed run into mechanical problems while submerged does nothing to increase
her story line’s emotional stakes. Her ordeal lasts what appears to be five
minutes, two of her colleagues are in the submersible with her and helping to
solve the problem, and even though they must return to the surface immediately
once it’s clear that they can, she has the samples that she needs.
At film’s end, I found myself thinking how much more poignant
this love story could have been if Danny’s story had been about joy rather than
pain and despair. What if her situation had been set up to reflect how love can
empower us to be even more successful when we are doing what we do best? What
if Danny, ignorant of James’ plight but energized by her experiences with him, had
allowed her work to be profoundly joyful rather than merely driven?
Ultimately, neither Wim Wenders’ direction nor James McAvoy
pouring his heart into his role could save this film’s highly contrived plot
riddled with clichés, some of which are downright offensive. If you’re in the
mood for torture-induced angst, go see The
Mercy. It wins hands down in terms of story building, believable
relationships, and overall quality of acting. Interestingly enough, it also offers
some insight into what the love story in Submergence
could have been.
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