The couple tries to have a child, but Isabel miscarries twice. It’s all enough to make Terrence Malick blush. Cue montage of sun-dappled embraces, wind-tousled hair and sweet nothings whispered, set to Alexandre Desplat’s unremarkably lovely score. They marry and she moves into his isolated seaside cottage, which is as quaint and inviting as something out of a Better Homes and Gardens spread. John Keats he’s not, but Isabel adores him. The subsequent courtship yields some eye-rolly exchanges, as when Isabel asks Tom what he wishes for in the future and he responds, simply, “Life.” The epistolary phase of their romance is equally dewy, with the two exchanging letters heard via voiceover: “You have a light inside you,” Tom writes to his beloved. One wonders why the indie-bred Cianfrance ( Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines) pursued something so square as his first major studio project - or, rather, why he leaned so far into the squareness.
Stedman, The Light Between Oceans is a fundamentally silly piece of work - think Nicholas Sparks in period drag - trying to pass as self-respecting.
But Cianfrance, while a skilled visual craftsman, is not the sublime stylist Sirk was, nor does he have that filmmaker’s willingness to lean into the excesses of his material. Great melodramas can accommodate preposterous plots Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession is a prime example. With a tone that’s somber bordering on portentous, it turns on three thinly drawn central figures whose fable-like story is driven by the kind of coincidences and contrivances that, aside from being easier to buy on the page than onscreen, make their sorrow feel arbitrary and weightless. Even judged by less exacting standards, The Light Between Oceans is an underwhelming experience.
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