The film is based on a popular M.L. Stedman novel. For the purpose of this Reaction, I don't care. In my mind, the story in the novel is perfect and doesn't matter at all to the movie. It was written and directed by Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines). He makes the shift to period work very well, not that it's very hard with a cast of Oscar collectors like Alicia Vikander (1 win), Rachel Weisz (1 win), and Michael Fassbender (2 nominations). And those three are why I saw the film. Weisz and Vikander can cry with the best of them. Fassbender is pantheon-level too, with his stoicism. The range of their performances is not in the variety of emotions displayed but the size of the few emotions they display. It's a melodrama. If you come into this expected anything else, I don't know what to tell you. The same goes for if you need me to assure you that all three leads are up to the task.
Now, the one big leap. This is a story that requires a lot of positioning. It begins with Tom Sherbourne (Fassbender) taking a job maintaining a remote lighthouse. A while after taking the job, he marries a local girl, Isabel (Vikander) who lives with him at the lighthouse after that. They want a child by she keeps having miscarriages. Shortly after her second miscarriage, a small boat washes up with a dead man and his infant daughter in it. Instead of reporting this, the couple takes the child as their own and buries the man's body. Four years later, they find out that the child belongs to a local woman, Hannah (Weisz). Tom is racked with guilt but Isabel can't imagine being torn from the child. You can guess how it develops from there, but it's not a movie about twists beyond the one I mentioned already, which is a reveal that the trailer covers too. There's a lot of heavy lifting to get this story set up and the film is in no hurry to get there. You spend a lot of time with Tom alone at the lighthouse, then Tom and Isabel as newlyweds, then Tom, Isabel, and the daughter as a family, and so on and so forth. That's fine as long as it stays true to the characters, which it does.
There's some major structural problems with the story. In order to have the reveal about who the child's actual mother is, it has to keep us away from Weisz for a very long time. As a result, she isn't nearly as developed and Vikander and Fassbender. The film attempts to cover this with some flashbacks, but it's not enough to overcome the fact that the audience doesn't understand her situation as well. Her husband (the man in the boat) gets about 10 lines in the movie and one of them is the inspiration for one of the biggest decisions in the film and it comes very late. That's a problem. I liked the version of the movie that was just about Vikander and Fassbender's characters. As good as Weisz is, trying to add her into the last half confuses who the movie is actually about.
The Light Between Oceans is fine. As a romance, it's lovely and tragic. As a story about parental love, it's heartbreaking and taps into some base level emotions. The balance of story and characters isn't perfect, and it can't stop itself from stepping on a few beats (the final scene should've had me bawling and certain decisions prevented that). With lesser actors, this could've been a complete snore. What most surprised me is that despite all the big emotions and plotting, it never betrayed the characters at the center, which is pretty remarkable.
Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend
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