Roger Ebert famously liked to say, “It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.” But then, he never saw “At the Sea.”
Premiering at the Berlin Film Festival, Kornél Mundruczó’s low-stakes, high-verve character study might as well be called “Much Ado About Nothing,” because it can’t overcome a simple, central fact: its main character is a bore, and her problems don’t amount to much. Mundruczó (“Pieces of a Woman,” “White God”) does what he can with the material — strengthening the “how” through visual lyricism and sharp formal choices — but neither he nor his talented collaborators can salvage the “what.” Their combined craft is adrift in a sea of banality.
Laura (Amy Adams) sets the tone from the start. “I don’t want to go back,” she says, floating in a pool in the film’s opening moments. Back, of course, means back to drinking — the pool belongs to a plush rehab clinic where she has spent considerable time. But it also means returning to the person she is outside its walls, back to the very life that drove her to the bottle in the first place.
Back she must go all the same. Money is running low, and someone has to take the reins of the faltering modern dance troupe that bears her name, a company handed down by her not-so-dearly departed father. (Did he also pass along a taste for self-destruction? You’d better believe it.) Given that legacy of questionable parenting, Laura’s children aren’t exactly thrilled by her return. But her doting trophy husband, a perfectly cast Murray Bartlett, seems more than ready to share the domestic load now that the household’s main breadwinner is back on her feet.
At first, Mundruczó keeps key details under wraps, leaving us to wonder how long Laura has been away and what exactly prompted her children’s chilly reception. Tension builds in the opening act, answered through sharp flashbacks and dreamlike interludes that give the story an uneasy rhythm mirroring Laura’s own apprehension. Once a star — now with a nasty scar running vertically down her right knee — Laura awkwardly tries to reintegrate into her family, moving with a stiffness that verges on rigor mortis, like a ghost dolefully haunting her former life.
Only the film never quite kicks into higher gear. Whatever tension exists dissipates when the few faint mysteries give way to answers as pedestrian as they are predictable, leaving a narrative powered mostly by star presence but otherwise rudderless. That Mundruczó apparently conceived the project as a showcase for Adams does her considerable talent no favors. If you’ll permit a metaphor, the role is more half-chewed than a feast.
The problems are structural above all. While questions of addiction, recovery, and family legacy are far from banal, the film’s approach certainly is. We meet a character who has long since hit bottom and already completed months of therapy. The Laura we see on screen has already had her breakthroughs; Adams’s task is mostly to sit and play patient, waiting for the results to show. For all her range, even Adams can’t transform a role whose climactic drama revolves around the riveting question of whether to divest part of a real-estate portfolio.
She gives her all, as does the film, channeling Laura’s supposed inner torments through woozy dance interludes and sweeping shots of the Massachusetts coast. But this operatic treatment clashes with a story so ultimately trivial: Addiction can be bested by simply saying no, professional misgivings vanish after a pep talk from a sympathetic colleague played by Dan Levy, and financial hiccups are resolved in a flash thanks to a louche family friend (Rainn Wilson) who has been lurking in the background all along.
In fairness to old Roger, there is a more fitting “how” for this wafer-thin plot — one that recognizes the inherent irony between teller and tale. For we all make mountains out of molehills, while few make films as unintentionally pompous as “At the Sea.”