THE WEIGHT OF WATER
Running time: 105 minutes. Rated R (violence, sexuality/nudity and brief language). At the Union Square, 13th Street and Broadway.
‘THE Weight of Water,” adapted from Anita Shreve’s best-selling novel, premiered two years ago at the Toronto Film Festival and it’s grown slightly moldy on the shelf awaiting a cinematic release.
Action director Kathryn Bigelow turns her hand to unhurried psychodrama but, apart from her evocative visual stylings, the film never matches the lyricism of its title.
As in Neil LaBute’s recent “Possession,” the action switches between past and present, but the material link is too tenuous to anchor the emotional connections that purport to span a 125-year divide.
Bigelow drags the chain for the first half, struggling to set up a parallel between a gruesome 19th-century double murder, based on real-life events, and a photojournalist’s fictional, modern-day investigation of the crime.
In 1873, a German man was hanged for murdering two immigrant Norwegian women on a desolate island off the coast of New Hampshire, but as the photographer, Jean (Catherine McCormack), delves further into the case, she uncovers evidence to suggest it may have been a crime of passion involving a third woman, Maren (Sarah Polley), who escaped that night.
In the present-day time-frame, a forced analogy builds as Jean’s own feelings of frustration and murderous rage begin to mirror Maren’s.
Sexual tension swells aboard the boat operated by her brother-in-law Rich (Josh Lucas), who has brought along his sexpot girlfriend, Adaline (Elizabeth Hurley).
Adding a distracting element of soft-core porn, Hurley’s character flirts shamelessly with Jean’s Pulitzer Prize-winning poet husband (Sean Penn), sucking suggestively on crab claws and rubbing ice cubes over her nipples as she sunbathes topless on the deck.
All the elements are in place for an entertaining murder mystery, but as Bigelow meanders aimlessly back and forth through time, the plot becomes increasingly water-logged.
Polley, a fine actress, provides the emotional flash point, but most of the other actors, particularly a very subdued Penn, fade into the scenery.