Paradise Regained

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

John Sayles is a filmmaker at home everywhere in the world--mythical South American countries (Men with Guns), Texas border towns (Lone Star), West Virginia a long time ago (Matewan). But wherever he goes, he finds ordinary people who turn out to have extraordinarily complicated back stories--stories that often have kinks in them that even they are unaware of.

As a stylist he's always seemed sort of prematurely mature, more earnest than flashy. But that gravity is also the source of his ripening strength; at a time when characterization is in short supply at the movies, Sayles keeps finding troubled, intelligent life in venues that are at once exotic and quotidian.

For example, the Juneau, Alaska, of Limbo. It seems to have a limitless supply of his kind of people--aging slackers muddling inconclusively along. Chief among them are Joe Gastineau (Sayles regular David Strathairn) and Donna De Angelo (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio). He's a handyman, an omnicompetent fixer-upper, who has abandoned the life he loves, as a fishing-boat captain, because he feels responsible for the death of two men on a long-ago voyage. She's a wandering bar singer--a very good one--encumbered by a sulky, judgmental adolescent daughter (Vanessa Martinez) but blessed by good nature. Like Joe, Donna deserves more from life; unlike him, she has a mysterious ability to bounce back from disappointment. She's not chirpy or fierce. Rather she just glows expectantly.

Sayles feels the life of this pair persuasively--no patronizing, but no false hopes either. There's nothing flighty about their romance. They come together warily, but also with a certain subtle, last-chance resolve. That's largely owing to the playing. Strathairn is one of those rare actors who make you believe it when they mime thinking. But it is Mastrantonio who is the revelation.

She's an actress who can take us from the relaxed romantic clarity of her songs (she sings all the vocals herself) to the damp miseries of Limbo's melodramatic (and harshly ambiguous) conclusion without our being aware of the downshifting. But then, for much of this decade, Mastrantonio has been a performer in search of a defining role. Or maybe not sufficiently in search of one--at least not with the teeth-gritted ferocity of her peers.

For she has chosen to live in London with her husband, director Pat O'Connor, raising their two sons. She had thought she could maintain her formerly bustling career, which included an Academy Award-nominated role in Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money. But "if you're not available in the U.S., you're just not seen," she says. And, besides, "I've never been a person to make sure I'm seen." She worked intermittently, of course, but became increasingly aware that "the phone hasn't rung and that you're not being offered things, and when you are, it's in soft focus."

On the other hand, she unaffectedly loves her family life. As she puts it, "You don't act better in a $20 million picture than you do in a $2 million one. The only thing that informs the acting is your life. My life has taken huge changes and shifts. And if I come back out of it and do a good performance, I have to think, really, that I wouldn't have done this performance 10 years ago."

Having known Mastrantonio, Sayles wrote Donna for her, infusing the character with what he calls her "resilience" and then creating a stern, surprising test for it. Civilization in Alaska is, after all, a thin membrane stretched across a vast wilderness, and the writer-director devises a way for Donna, Joe and her daughter to fall into the darkness. On a seemingly innocent cruise with his half brother, they are beset by murderous demons out of the brother's shady past and become castaways on a deserted island--their resources (and survivalist skills) scant, the knowledge that the criminals must seek them out certain. The mood shift is wrenching--this is almost a self-contained second movie. But it's a pretty good one also, resolving as it does the relationship between adults and child and also giving Mastrantonio the chance to let some cracks in her composure begin to show. The movie may be called Limbo, but it definitively rescues Mastrantonio from the land of the lost. If her next film, the small Scottish family drama My Life So Far, grants her similar opportunities, she may look forward to, if not $20 million pictures, then the sharp-focus roles she so richly deserves.

--With reporting by Helen Gibson/London

With reporting by Helen Gibson/London