#there's a scene in the trailer where Eric comes upon who might be this movie's version of T-Bird and dude says the 'we killed you' line

[50books50movies]

Arrival (2016)

Trailer

Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival is secretly two films, but it’s not two films in the way that Memento or The Usual Suspects is secretly two films. Though I haven’t seen Arrival a second time, I’m not sure if there’s a compulsion to see it a second time to pick up clues the way that viewers might be compelled to see Memento, The Usual Suspects, or other puzzle films again immediately. Instead, Arrival’s double-sided nature can be appreciated the moment the credits roll when you realize that Villeneueve, screenwriter Eric Heisserer, and Amy Adams have created a film that attacks the brain and the heart, working one end while secretly tunneling in to ambush the other. 

The film begins its offensive on the heart with a sequence rivaling the “married life” segment of Up. Dr. Louise Banks, played by Adams, narrates as we see glimpses of a girl’s life. A baby is born; games of cowboy are played in washed out forests and along lake edges; a teenage girl is sick; a girl is in a hospital bed; the bed is empty. Grief is communicated in cinematic shorthand in a film about language and the importance of communication, and the sequence sets the mood for the viewer from the start. 

Informed by this melancholy preamble, we see Dr. Banks exert her linguistic skills on the challenge of bridging the communication gap with the alien Heptapods. Her primary partner in these efforts is Jeremy Renner’s Dr. Ian Donnelly, a theoretical physicist who becomes close to Dr. Banks. Away from the bombast of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Bourne franchise, Renner is able to make Donnelly believably nerdy, shedding the tough exterior from those films for the interiority that he achieved in The Hurt Locker and American Hustle. 

The anguish is tempered with frustration, from the adverse effect that geopolitics driven by men has on Dr. Banks’s efforts to understand and communicate with (because those are two very different tasks) the Heptapods to the stress that the work lays on Dr. Banks. She is deprived of sleep both because of the demand of the work and because, when she does sleep, she dreams of her daughter.

When there is violence, it is because men have interpreted signs in the worst possible way. An intelligence liaison, played by Michael Stuhlbarg, closes the American camp’s channel because the Chinese and Russian camps have theirs. A soldier bombs the Heptapods’ ship because he interprets his significant other’s terror and the uninformed conjectures from the outside as a call to violent action. A Chinese soldier readies the might of the People’s Liberation Army because he cannot help but think that the Heptapods present a threat even though they’ve done nothing more threaten than show up, spray ink at a screen, or slowly turn their vessels ninety degrees in the air. Bravery is Dr. Banks taking off her orange contamination suit so the Heptapods can see that humans are individuals to open the lines of communication or going to the ship on her own to try to repair the relationship after the bombing.

Though the film tastes of sorrow, it’s probably the most hopeful movie I’ve seen in a while because it emphasizes discovery and interpersonal communication above all else. We experience the type of conflict one would expect from a movie about alien visitors only through far off sound effects and an obscured view; the focus is on Dr. Banks and Dr. Donnelly trying to reach a breakthrough in their communication with the Heptapods. The Heptapods don’t lash out when an explosion detonates in their ship; they turn their ships so that we can’t attack them, and the Heptapods take care to make sure that Banks and Donnelly are safe. 

Once upon a time, Amy Adams was the monster of the week on Smallville, a young woman who was obsessed with becoming thinner. By unknowingly ingesting vegetables tainted with kryptonite, Amy Adams’s Jodi Melville’s metabolism was hyper-accelerated, but she developed a craving for fat. I remember next seeing Amy Adams in Sunshine Cleaning, where seeing Adams play with how she portrays emotions on her face was the draw. She also picked up a sense of gritty realness that was, by definition, a departure from the magical benevolence she projected in Enchanted and would show off again in The Muppets. She showed a steely resolve in The Master and American Hustle. In Arrival, she taps a vein of sorrow from Sunshine Cleaning, the strength from The Master and American Hustle, and the compassion from The Muppets and Enchanted to create Dr. Louise Banks that feels emotionally open to the viewer, if not the other characters. Villeneuve turns to Adams consistently as the film’s emotional barometer, relying on her to set the emotional tone for how the audience should react by showing how she reacts to something that Villeneuve and cinematographer Bradford Young will show us shortly. 

Thus, I was gripped by the film’s sense of grief, wonder, and optimism. Given what we’re told in the preamble, I was invested in Dr. Banks, thinking that this was a story of a woman finding catharsis in her monumental work, establishing first contact and communicating with an alien species, building a relationship with them instead of blowing them away and maybe taking their technology for our own so we can backwards engineer them for our own benefit. 

Until we got to resolution, and I could see the other film that Villeneuve had been making right under my nose. I don’t normally offer spoiler warnings, but this is one case where I will put them in huge letters. Suffice it to say that I could have recommended the film without reservation even without the twist.

[BE ADVISED. SPOILERS HENCEFORTH.]

The Heptapods didn’t share the technology for interstellar travel with humanity, but it shared an even more important tool: a language that could allow the user to see beyond the moment and perceive time in its entirety. Working with the Heptapods’ language allowed Dr. Banks to receive information from the future, creating causality loops to ensure that a future where humanity avoids attacking the Heptapods comes to pass. Because Dr. Banks is able to receive information from the future, we are led to conclude that the scenes involving her daughter are actually glimpses at her future. Dr. Banks isn’t a grieving mother and divorcee at the beginning of the film; she will have a child with Dr. Donnelly in her future, and they will eventually separate. Her daughter will eventually die. But it hasn’t happened yet for Dr. Banks.

Villeneuve uses cinematic language to lead us to that conclusion and does not challenge our assumption until he reveals the twist at the very end. The very act of placing that montage at the beginning of the film makes it seem like the chronological start of the film’s events. What we see first must surely be what happens first in the film even though viewers everywhere are familiar with the idea of flashback. Because there wasn’t an obvious signal in Adams’s appearance, the common point between the preamble and the rest of the film, that showed that she was older in those scenes, we are led to believe that they took place in Dr. Banks’s past. Furthermore, Banks spoke in the past tense during the preamble, so we’re led to conclude by the virtue of how English is constructed to assume when the preamble took place. The preamble primes the viewers to make this assumption and carry that assumption to draw conclusions about Dr. Banks. The viewer is then invited to examine the inherent biases they have in drawing those conclusions about Dr. Banks. Did we assume that Amy Adams was projecting sadness when she could have just been projecting a serious professionalism? If we did assume, why did we make that assumption? Was it because she’s a woman? 

I didn’t feel cheated by the twist; instead, I was impressed by how deftly my own understanding and assumptions had been used against to build the twist. It created a second film; this adventure with the Heptapods becomes the prologue to the relationship that Banks and Donnelly will have.  It’s a brilliant manipulation of the viewer’s own awareness of cinematic language, underlying assumptions that reinforces the film’s themes about the how language itself is the greatest barrier to effective communication.

#arrival #films #movies #amy adams #jeremy renner #michael stuhlbarg #denis villeneuve #bradford young #johan johansson #eric heisserer