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LIMBO Send This Review to a Friend
Writer-director John Sayles gets better and more daring with each new work, and "Limbo" is thoroughly engrossing and beautifully made. It is also likely to produce cries of frustration because of one gimmick, which I will not reveal. But that shouldn't lessen the overall enjoyment.
Set in Alaska and featuring splendid scenery captured by the great cinematographer Haskell Wexler, "Limbo" is a film about three main characters whose lives are in the state manifested by the title. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio gives a lovely, shaded performance as Donna, a singer who earns money but never achieved stardom. She leaves her musician boyfriend at the outset of the film. It's one more in a line of failed relationships. Mastrantonio does her own singing and she's really good as well as immensely likable.
Donna's teenage daughter Noelle, played poignantly and skillfully by Vanessa Martinez, is sullen and rebellious, resenting her mother's lovers, missing the father she has never known, and tending toward possible suicide, hinted at by an act of minor self-mutilation. Donna has her hands full.
Into Donna's world comes David Strathairn as Joe, so nice that he seems too good to be true. Joe harbors a sad history as a former fisherman. A getting acquainted scene between Donna and Joe is memorable for its tenderness, expressiveness and deeply human responses. They seem like real people in the antithesis of typical Hollywood romantic encounters. There's a good supporting performance by Kris Kristofferson as loose cannon.
Joe is hired by a lesbian couple to work as a fisherman using a boat they have acquired. He is approached by his problem younger half-brother Bobby (Casey Siemaszko) to accompany him on a boat trip, but Bobby lies about the purpose. Donna and Noelle are aboard and…you'll have to learn the details of the ensuing adventure for yourself.
The plot of "Limbo" is just the trapping. What really works is the way Sayles has developed his characters, their relationships and the feeling for "the last frontier" environment, with the depiction of change, including the slump in the fishing industry and talk of the plundering of trees by the lumber industry. Sayles covers much that is thought-provoking even as he entertains us with his exquisite moviemaking. A Screen Gems release.
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