Big themes weigh down ‘Aloft’
Print Edition
“aloft” is not an easy film. Peruvian director Claudia Llosa’s meditative, generation-spanning drama about a falconer (Cillian Murphy) on a journey to find his healer and artist mother (Jennifer Connelly) languishes in tragedy. The frozen landscape is sun-soaked but unforgiving and the characters are burdened with the weight of the world and a futile hope for salvation.
The melancholy tale first introduces Nana (Connelly) and her two young boys Ivan (Zen McGrath) and Gully (Winta McGrath) as they attempt to join up with a New Age religious group of sorts. They wear heavy knits and furrowed brows and follow a man they call The Architect (William Shimmell). Gully is sick and regressing. The Architect has healing powers, but uses them only selectively.
Ivan inadvertently causes immediate trouble when his pet falcon flies into a delicate and forbidden twig hut that we can only presume was built by The Architect. Later, one of the disciples shoots the falcon. It’s a premonition of the strife that’s soon to follow for Nana and Ivan as they attempt to live while knowing that death is imminent for Gully.
The story soon jumps to the present, where a now-grown Ivan (Murphy) takes up with Jannia (Melanie Laurent), a French documentarian who is interested in finding Ivan’s mother. Still as cheerless as he was as a kid, Ivan leaves behind his beautiful wife (Oona Chaplin, granddaughter of Charlie Chaplin) and baby to accompany Jannia to the Arctic Circle and find some peace and perhaps an explanation as to why he was abandoned 20 years prior.
Connelly gives a bold and raw performance as a strong but increasingly desperate mother looking for a way to save her youngest. She has a world-weary spirituality that lets her fully disappear into Nana. Both child actors also expertly convey the bone-deep sadness necessary for this story.
“Aloft” is ambitious and lovely in many ways. And yet, despite its formal achievements and all-in performances by its talented cast, the film buckles under ponderous themes. Ultimately “Aloft” is a beautiful, leaden slog.
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