Restless

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT > MOVIE REVIEW

By R. Kurt Osenlund

Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Sep. 29, 2011

Annabel (Mia Wasikowska) plays a teriminally-ill teenager who falls for the eccentric and somewhat dark Enoch (Henry Hopper).

There’s a scene around the midpoint of Gus Van Sant’s “Restless” that basically encapsulates why it’s almost unwatchable, and why it could have been far better. In one of the most grossly indie-fied movie dates in memory, Annabel (Mia Wasikowska) and Enoch (Henry Hopper), two kindred souls who celebrate the mundane and downplay the extraordinary, get all gussied up to sneak into a morgue, then rave about its splendor and invent narratives for the dead.

Just as you’re about to puke from all the forced quirk and feigned enthrallment, a nurse wheels in a fresh stiff and tells the kids to scram. Annabel looks into the dead girl’s face and provides a rare moment of haunting revelation, as she, too, will be dead in three months.

Ever-fascinated by the fleeting gift of youth, Van Sant knows enough to offer silent suggestions of the terrible emotions swirling inside young Annabel, who’s stricken with terminal brain cancer. But, as it is throughout “Restless,” he drowns so true an element with a boatload of cuddly, affected hogwash.

Enoch, for example, never leaves the house without a wicked case of bedhead, just in case his deceased parents, history of attempted suicide, funeral-crashing pastime, and Kamikaze ghost of a best friend (Ryo Kase) weren’t evidence enough that he’s fresh off the artsy-weirdo assembly line. And Annabel embraces the odd isms of her new beau with such immediate, I’m-weird-too cheeriness that it all seems more “Looney Tunes” than love story (Date No. 2: Outlining each other in chalk on the street).

The couple’s back-burnering of fears via mortality nonchalance probably showed promise on the pages of screenwriter Jason Lew’s original play, but on screen it’s in awkward contradiction with all the gooey put-ons, making the movie even less palatable. Also enamored of songbirds with short life spans (get it?), Annabel has a Darwin obsession, and making a certain connection is simply unavoidable: For Van Sant, this is a de-evolution, an instance of an oft-poetic filmmaker way off his game.