Mark Reviews Movies: ADRIFT

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 31, 2018

The narrative of Adrift establishes a precise before-and-after structure. The key to the film's ultimate point is determining on what event that back-and-forth is centered.

The story here is fairly simple: A man and a woman take a yacht out to sea, and their vessel is severely damaged in a hurricane. The film opens after the hurricane, and as one character tries to find her fellow sailor, the story jumps backwards in time five months. The two timelines run parallel throughout the film—a tale of survival and the story of how the two sailors ended up on that ill-fated boat.

At least that's the simple way of stating how the story plays out. The film's screenplay comes, according to some text accompanying the title, from "a true story," as documented in the book by Tami Oldham Ashcraft (written with Susea McGearhart). The easy way to tell this story is simply to juxtapose the before and after portions of the tale, with a focus on the whys and the hows of the two characters' eventual date with tragedy and the particulars of the consequences.

Instead, screenwriters Aaron Kandell, Jason Kandell, and David Branson Smith tell a love story about two incredibly compatible people and how that love is challenged when things get rough. The story's climactic scenes reveal an even greater challenge that would, despite the film's real-life foundation, be an error to divulge. Let's just say that those who have read the book will, apparently, think the filmmakers have taken some extremely liberal dramatic license with a key piece of information about the true story. For those concerned about that, it should be said that such an assumption is wrong.

At the start (following a haunting image of familiar-looking figure slowly sinking into the darkness of the water), Tami (Shailene Woodley) is alone and unconscious in the cabin of a yacht. The boat creaks and groans as it rocks with the waves. Director Baltasar Kormákur follows her shaky movements through the interior of the boat, looking for a way out and calling out for her partner. As she emerges through a hatch to the deck, the camera moves with her, taking in the expanse of the cloudy skies and even darker gray water. There is nothing out there.

Five months earlier, Tami arrives in Tahiti on the next stop of her wandering the world. She gets a job at the docks, and while she's working, Richard (Sam Claflin), a handsome and bearded older man who looks like he has some stories to tell, arrives on his boat. Their romance is quick to form, as he tells her about how he made his vessel on his own and she takes him to adventurous spots in the jungle.

At first, the structure seems like gimmick—a way for the screenwriters to have things and conversations happen when at least half of this story takes place on a cramped boat in the middle of nowhere. Something happens, though, as Tami and Richard begin to have their adventures and their talks in the past. Mainly, we come to really like these two characters. There's far more to this romance than looks, caresses, and kisses set against tropical backdrops. We gain an understanding of the kind of person each one is, from Tami's relationship with her young mom (and the hint of a father who became absent for good reason) to the absence of Richard's mother, who died when he was a boy.

Both of them are more honest with each other than their outward appearances would suggest. In their roaming of the world, there's the notion of adventure and rebellion against the norm—having felt weighed down by the pressures of the respective parent in going through the motions of an ordinary life. Alone together, over dinner in Richard's boat or lying on a beach, we come to understand that these are essentially two lost souls, looking for a place somewhere, as long as it isn't home. Even Richard admits that sailing around the world isn't much fun—the sunburn, the seasickness, the loneliness, the hallucinations that come from complete isolation. He still does it, though, because of a feeling—a calling, either toward some place or away from something.

In each other, they've found a kindred spirit. It may sound cheesy, but both Woodley and Claflin are sincere and charming enough to make it work.

Meanwhile, after the storm, Tami struggles to get the devastated boat in some form of working order, while keeping an eye on the horizon for any sign of Richard. She finds him, clinging to the side of the yacht's dinghy—his ribs cracked and his leg shattered. Their original destination was San Diego, where Tami once called home, but thinking the trek might take too long, given Richard's condition and the short supply of water and food, the two decide to make for Hawaii.

What we get in the survival scenes is a pretty inspiring depiction of resourcefulness and inner-strength. Woodley's performance in these scenes is vital to their success, and she shows a real sense of Tami's mind at work with each opportunity to better her chances and every challenge (After coughing up blood, she casually wipes it off her hand, as if pragmatically thinking that it's a problem for later).

The heart of the film, though, is the love story, and what appears fairly straightforward takes on a new tenor as the violent events of the storm unfold, set against the calmness of Tami's comprehension that some end—for good or for ill—is approaching in her present labors to survive. The climactic moments of Adrift redefine what has come before them in a way that reveals as much about Tami as it does the full extent of this romance.

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