I finally saw Ron Howard‘s Eden last night, and yeah, I get it — it’s not much fun to watch. This doesn’t make it a “bad” film — just an unpleasant one. It’s basically a grubby, sandy, hand-to-mouth survival story, set in the early 1930s, about a few German settlers of Floreana, one of the Gallapagos Islands…a gnarly, rocky, non-tropical, water-poor place roughly 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador…dogs, cows, lizards, steep paths, scrub brush, etc.
I like Owen Gleiberman’s capsule description — “a misanthropic survivalist Robinson Crusoe meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with deranged footnotes by Friedrich Nietzsche.”
It’s not Howard’s fault that all but two of the characters are generally foul, perverse types. Well, okay…Howard chose to re-tell this calamitious true story but he’s just passing along what happened…just sticking to the facts.
All I knew last night was that it felt like a real drag to hang with three of the characters — Jude Law‘s Dr. Friedrich Ritter, a chilly, judgmental misanthrope…Vanessa Kirby‘s Dore Strauch, Ritter’s significant other and a chilly, malevolent blonde in her own right…and Ana de Armas‘s haughty Austrian bitch, Baroness Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn, who has an entitled attitude from hell.
There’s also a half-grown son (Jonathan Tittel), a pair of boy-toy types (Toby Wallace, Felix Kammerer) and a well-educated fellow with a movie camera who briefly visits the island (Richard Roxburgh).
The two decent settlers are Sydney Sweeney‘s Margret Wittmer, who lived on Floreana from 1932 until her death at age 95 in 2000, and Margret’s husband Heinz (Daniel Brühl).
Sweeney’s performance has nothing to do with her big boobs, and everything to do with real-deal, dug-in acting that feels genuine and un-“performed”. Zero makeup, her convincing German accent, Margret’s no-nonsense dialogue…Sweeney is the clear standout. Yes, viewers will talk about her baby-birthing scene while dogs are growling and snapping at her, but I believed each and every line and gesture. In every one of her scenes Margret touches the bottom of the pool.
For the last seven years or so Sweeney has struck me as a somewhat breezy lightweight with bodacious ta-tas…Under the Silver Lake, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Reality, Americana, Anyone but You, Madame Web, Christy, the sure-to-be-trashy The Housemaid. Now I respect her. Now I’ve seen through the facade.
