‘The Light Between Oceans’ doesn’t shine like it should

It’s hard to know exactly where The Light Between Oceans, the weepy, sweeping period drama starring Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander, takes place.

Like the M.L. Stedman novel on which it is based, it’s supposed to be along the rugged coast of Western Australia (though it was actually filmed in New Zealand and Tasmania). But director/writer Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines) makes the sense of place nearly anonymous so it could almost be any wild shore in the English-speaking world after WWI.

While this does nothing to lessen the ravishing beauty of the locations, it does lend a certain generic sensibility that is indicative of the movie overall. While Fassbender and Vikander are excellent and the chemistry between them is palpable — they are romantically involved after having met while making this film — The Light Between Oceans never quite shrugs off its staid decorum to become something truly moving.

Fassbender is Tom Sherbourne, a soldier emotionally broken by his experiences in the Great War. He wants to get away from everything and everyone and applies for one of the loneliest jobs in the world: lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, a slab of stone in the middle of the crosscurrents where the Indian Ocean and the Great Southern Ocean meet.

He wants a life of solitude and contemplation but instead, in town one day, meets Isabel (Vikander), who is immediately smitten. On a picnic, she tells him she’d like to see the lighthouse. The rules don’t allow for random visitors but she could go if she were his wife. So, she proposes.

In the book, this probably works better because there would be more time to explore the growing attraction, the bloom of romance and Tom’s presumably tough decision to upend his entire life’s plan to make room for her in his life and lighthouse.

In the film, it comes across as rushed.

They are ecstatically happy for a time, especially after Isabel discovers she’s pregnant. But the joy soon dims when she miscarries. They try again and are no more successful. Vikander is phenomenal in these scenes of profound, devastating physical loss.

So when a dinghy washes up on shore with a dead man and surviving infant daughter, it seems like a gift from heaven for Isabel. She begs Tom to bury the man and let her keep the child as their own. No one would be the wiser. Better that than notifying the authorities and having the kid shuffled off to an orphanage.

What could go wrong?

Well, everything, especially since nobody thinks to ask if the baby girl has a living mother.

It’s here we get the back story of the man found in the boat, Frank (Leon Ford), a German immigrant harassed to the point of despair because of his nationality, and his Australian wife, Hannah (an excellent Rachel Weisz), who marries him over the objections of her father (an under-utilized Bryan Brown).

Juggling of the two stories and all their elements — Tom’s guilt, Isabel’s nervous happiness, Hannah’s devastation at thinking she has lost both her husband and child to the sea — the film feels overstuffed. And for those who like the sense of edge and danger in Cianfrance’s previous films, The Light Between Oceans is a far more traditional, less rewarding exercise.

But it’s all supremely well-acted and stunningly photographed. If Janus Rock were a real place, it would probably be overrun with visitors after this. No doubt, the Western Australia tourist authority is going to be fielding a lot of inquiries in the next few months.

Still, it’s hard to overcome the feeling that The Light Between Oceans doesn’t burn as brightly as it should.

This story was originally published August 31, 2016 at 1:18 PM with the headline "‘The Light Between Oceans’ doesn’t shine like it should."