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Movie Review: 'The Light Between Oceans'

By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Tears will be shed.

Not oceans, perhaps, but plenty. And they'll be earned, not jerked.

That's because The Light Between Oceans is a good cry and an even better movie.

 

3½
(3½ stars out of 4!)

 

Based on the 2012 best-seller by M.L. Stedman, it's an exquisite, tender-hearted melodrama about a lighthouse keeper and his wife in western Australia.

Michael Fassbender stars as Tom Sherbourne, a somber veteran suffering from survivor's guilt after four harrowing years of World War I who accepts a position as a lighthouse keeper on a remote island and then meets Isabel Graysmark, played by Alicia Vikander, who despite losing both her brothers to war is as outgoing and optimistic and impulsive and full of life as he is wary and retiring and closed off and consistently principled.

The opposites attract, fall in love, marry, and set up housekeeping at their isolated lighthouse.

But their attempts to start a family prove problematic and she has two miscarriages.

Then one day a rowboat washes ashore in which are a dead man and a crying two-month-old baby.

Isabel accepts it as a sign from God and talks Tom into ignoring his employer's rules and not report what has happened.

Instead, they bury the man, keep the child, and raise her as their own.

Which they do – and quite happily – until they encounter Hannah Roennfeldt, a woman who lost a husband and daughter at sea several years ago.

Tom and Isabel know, of course, that this is their child's birth mother.

What to do.

Writer-director Cianfrance (Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines) has concocted a handsome, visceral melodrama, given it epic sweep, and – perhaps most crucially -- cast it well.

His three principals, sporting Oscar credibility – Fassbender nominated for 12 Years a Slave and Steve Jobs, Vikander a winner for The Danish Girl, and Weisz a winner for The Constant Gardner – don't disappoint in their collective attempt to create light between Oscars.

The Light Between Oceans is about love and loss and grieving and fate and the bad choices we make for what seem like good reasons and the inevitably challenging and punishing consequences of our actions.

And Cianfrance uses the majestic scenery as more than just backdrop: the landscape seems to enhance the power of the tragic, heart-wrenching proceedings playing out in the foreground.

So we'll wash ashore 3-1/2 stars out of 4. The Light Between Oceans is a beautifully sad work of art and a remarkable immersive experience.

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