Beautiful
Alaska is the location of Limbo, a film that
features characters who have failed to succeed in the lower
forty-eight states and have decided to try out the challenge
of America’s last frontier. John Sayles, who wrote, directed,
and edited Limbo, as usual selects a small town
(here Port Henry, but actually Juneau) as the venue of his
films so that we can see how humans negotiate their survival
amid deep, often irreconcilable conflict. The heroine is Donna
De Angelo (played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), a hedonist
singer who shacks up with men for a while and then pulls out,
but she drags along her teenage daughter Noelle (played by
Vanessa Martinez). Noelle in turn longs for but is repeatedly
denied stability, though she copes by writing fascinating
short stories. As the film begins, we see exploited Filipino
workers cleaning fish and waiting on tables at a party, a
fat cat who struck it rich by greedily cutting down acres
of remote virgin forests, reference to unemployment in both
industries, and a cynical vision of the future of Alaska as
a tourist mecca where the canneries and forests are the attractions.
We even see quarreling Lesbians. Donna, having sung her last
song with a band because she has decided to break up with
a bandleader, asks for a ride from a man delivering wine to
the party named Joe Gastineau (played by David Strathaim),
who claims ingenuously that he had to give up a career as
a pro basketball star because of an injury. Once in town,
Donna bamboozles Joe into helping her to move her possessions
from the bandleader’s apartment to a room over the nightclub
where she will be performing. Soon, Donna finds herself so
attracted to Joe that she wants to sleep with him on a boat
trip up the Alaska coast with his half-brother Bobby (played
by Casey Siemaszko). However, Bobby owes big money to drug
dealers, and the secret purpose of the trip is to evade those
trying to collect the debt. While the drug dealers catch up
with the boat and kill Bobby, Donna, Noelle, and Joe swim
to an uninhabited island, first hoping to avoid being shot
and then desperate to be rescued before an approaching winter.
Joe undertakes survival measures, including foodgathering
and lighting a signal fire. Donna tries to find the bright
side of a desperate situation, but ultimately experiences
gloom. Noelle provides nightly entertainment by reciting a
fascinating story, pretending that she is reading from a diary
that she discovered in an abandoned hut; the line about life
in Alaska as "limbo" comes from her lips as she imagines how
another family would have suffered and died as fox trappers.
Weeks pass before they are spotted by Smilin’ Jack (played
by Kris Kristofferson), who has been hired by the drug dealers
to find them but lack fuel to fly them back to civilization.
As the film ends, a seaplane is in the air, the three awaiting
either a rescue or death, and filmviewers walk out of the
theatre wondering whether they were killed or rescued, hoping
for a sequel to the story but aware that their death is more
likely in an Alaska where the norm is that the rich will continue
illegally and with impunity to defile nature and to exploit
the poor. In short, Sayles is again a cinematic Michener who
has chosen Alaska as the place to make the same point—that
the rich are getting richer at the expense of everyone else
because Americans are conditioned to disbelieve in the existence
of a brutal class structure in the United States. But perhaps
in Alaska, Sayles appears to say, the gap between rich is
poor is presented in a more raw form than elsewhere. MH
I
want to comment on this film
