It can be satisfying when a movie takes its time announcing its intentions, drawing you gradually into its atmosphere and savoring the ripe tension of the question: Where’s this thing going? This approach can drive people mad. I heard complaints last year that “The Secret Agent” was slow, as you are halfway into its 160 minutes before you know what its protagonist is doing. With the right movie, I love that prolonged sense of a trap being set. I prefer Christmas Eve to Christmas Day, as anticipation often trumps reveal.
“Islands” is that kind of movie. Co-writer-director Jan-Ole Gerster savors the setting, which is understandable given that it’s the Canary Islands. The location allows Gerster to offer a series of nearly found tensions: namely between the craggy deserts and the beautiful beaches and the townie culture and the tourist industry, which is really a tension between the wealthy and those that are hardly making it in the service industry. There’s a delicious sense in this movie of a subterranean world, of the barely hidden.
Gerster sets about to playing with you immediately. Tom (Sam Riley) wakes up in the desert of Fuerteventura, where “Islands” is primarily set, and gets in his car and drives back a few miles to the resort where he works as a tennis instructor. Is he a drunk or are we in the middle of a thriller situation? Gerster answers this question within a few scenes: Tom is a functional drunk who is accustomed to facing the day disheveled and hungover. He keeps a bottle of liquor in a maintenance cabinet for the morning pick-me-up, and sweats through tennis classes before the nightly rituals at a local club.
The locals are tolerant of Tom in a fashion that is typical of a resort setting in which exaggerated hungers are a natural part of the habitat. There’s no hand-wringing over Tom’s drinking or the corruption of society, as Gerster does you the courtesy of treating you like an adult. The intriguing, winding first act of “Islands” inducts you into the amount of information and power that someone in Tom’s situation can wield. He’s a stop on the chain connecting the law with the townies and the resort’s tendrils of vice. He’s a lubricator of transactions, a guy with little who enjoys quiet exertions of influence.
Sam Riley, in a wonderful performance, never quite reduces Tom to cliché. Despite the booze, the drugs, the inevitable sex and the sway with police, and the little favors from the front desk, there’s an innocence to him. He’s neither evil nor naïve; he’s handsome and sexy in a bohemian drunk way but he’s not an egocentric cocksman. He’s like a washed-up P.I. in a noir without the hard-boiled cynicism. There’s a fine hint of Jack Nicholson in “Chinatown” to Tom.
We’re with Tom and his day-to-day routine for a while — I probably could’ve taken an entire movie on the contours of his existence. A vacationing family drifts into his orbit, Anne (Stacy Martin) and Dave (Jack Farthing) and their 7-year-old son, Anton (Dylan Torrell). Anne is lovely, Dave is smug, and they are in that late stage of a faltering relationship in which they fight in front of people they just met under the guise of jest. Tom does them a series of favors and shows them the less-touristy side of the islands, while Anne gives him lingering looks and steals the occasional touch.
At this point, “Islands” seems to be drifting into the terrain of writer Patricia Highsmith, most famous for her Ripley novels, cold-blooded thrillers that also centered on a striver named Tom who managed to benefit profoundly from brushes with the upper class. You may also think of Woody Allen’s “Match Point,” which pivoted on a tennis instructor and a sexy woman who was with a wealthier and clueless man. These associations are no doubt intentionally tweaked by Gerster, but he keeps you wondering.
While you wonder, other surprises unfold. I kind of grew to like Dave, whose entitlement and cluelessness become weirdly poignant — a trick that Matthew Goode also managed in the equivalent role in “Match Point.” Jack Farthing’s performance is, refreshingly for contemporary cinema, not an easy caricature of a rich jackass. Dave might not even have that much money — the movie is ambiguous on that point. But he is certainly a man who feels trapped, as does Tom, and on this point, they find communion. Gerster is alive to how dudes from differing classes can unexpectedly bond over mutual insecurities.
Is this a thriller, or what? Is Tom recruited to bump off Anne and/or Dave? Are Anne and Dave drawing Tom into a snare? As Tom flirts with assuming a role in Dave’s family, I even wondered if we were entering into the realm of a Paul Auster novel, with the thriller set-up as a preamble to something postmodern and existential. Are Tom and Dave the same person, for instance? It doesn’t do you a service to tell you which way “Islands” is headed. Life is wondering, after all.
I will say once again though: “Islands” is a riff on traps, whether they are forged by society, or especially, by oneself. While you’re trying to solve a mystery that might not even exist, Gerster proffers a moving and atmospheric character study.
“Tow” is also a riff on traps, social and personal alike. It also even takes as its protagonist an alcoholic, in this case, Amanda (Rose Byrne), who lives in her 1991 Toyota Camry while attempting to find work in a veterinarian office. When we meet her, she has been sober for seven months and is trying to dig herself out of rock bottom. Then her Camry is stolen, towed and held hostage by the towing company for a few hundred dollars. If you have no money, a couple hundred might as well be a million.
The surprise of “Tow” is that it’s a comedy rather than a stark social issues procedural. The filmmakers — director Stephanie Laing and screenwriters Jonathan Keasey and Brant Boivin— lull us with jokes and hit the calamity of this situation from unexpected angles, mixing deft punchlines with an unusual sense of detail, particularly in terms of how Amanda lives without what she calls a conventional home. The cleverness opens your receptors to the message, which concerns the hypocrisy of a stifling bureaucratic labyrinth that favors those who can hire lawyers to circumvent or even restructure said labyrinth.
Laing and the eclectic cast — this is a movie with tasty bits for Dominic Sessa, Simon Rex, Octavia Spencer and Corbin Bernsen — articulate the maddening difficulty of re-entering society if you’ve economically flatlined. How do you get a job if you’re living in your car? And how do you get your car back if you need to pay the fine with money from a job that you need the car to get, etc. There have been fine recent-ish movies on this sort of hypocrisy, usually from France, like “The Measure of a Man” and “Full Time.” They are despairing dramas with an acute sense of bureaucratic detail. American movies tend to get earnest and generic on these topics.
“Tow,” however, laces its details with a blend of “Legally Blonde” and “Erin Brockovich.” Amanda’s indomitable nature is exasperating and moving, inspiring and often quite funny, and Rose Byrne doesn’t cheat to get easy sympathy from the audience — she shows you how the exasperation feeds the victories as well as the losses that got Amanda in this situation. After her Oscar nomination for “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” it seems that Byrne is becoming a specialist in mixing broad and pitch-black comedy with the precision of a sniper. Byrne is extraordinary in both movies, though “Tow,” with its mixture of despair and sunniness, allows her to utilize more colors in her palette.
“Islands” is now available to rent on demand, while “Tow” is in theaters everywhere.
