Restless
Directed by Gus Van Sant
Distributed by Sony Pictures Classic
Enoch Brae (Henry Hopper, son of the late great Dennis Hopper) is a death-obsessed teenager who spends most of his time doing what death-obsessed teenagers do. He lies down and draws crime scene-style chalk outlines of himself. He plays battleship against the ghost of a Japanese kamikaze pilot named Hiroshi. And he attends funerals of people he’s never met.
It’s at one of these funerals where he meets Annabel Cotton. Cotton, played by Mia Wasikowska, is a girl who has taken a few pages out of Vampire Weekend bassist Ezra Koenig’s style guide to form a charming indie romantic interest which no guy in his right mind could resist.
But Brae isn’t in his right mind, so resist he does, until prompted by Hiroshi to go say hello. Brae and Cotton bond over the death of his parents, and he warms up to her.
They start doing charming things like hanging out under bridges, going to morgues, and talking to Hiroshi.
This is the essential plot of Gus Van Sant’s new film, Restless. Van Sant is known as a talented director, but his inconsistencies have always placed him outside the pantheon of independent filmmakers. That said, there was quite a bit of optimism surrounding the production of this film, because van Sant was working on such familiar territory: death.
Sadly, the familiarity hurt the film more than helped it. The film feels, well, safe.
The camera is delicate and intimate at all the right moments, and Danny Elfman’s soft, acoustic guitar heavy score adds nicely to the mood.
But when you’re watching the montage that begins towards the end of the film, you can’t help but feel that you’ve seen this all before.
At no point is Van Sant pushing the boundaries of the indie romance flick. It’s like he picked up a script that was Harold and Maude meets A Walk to Remember and decided to make exactly that film.
However, there’s a lot to be said for the ability of a good ending to make a film, and the final act of Restless is excellent. Without saying too much, it manages to be beautiful and thought-provoking without seeming too derivative, which is something it should have shared with the first two thirds of this movie.
While it probably won’t blow you away, Restless is still a movie worth watching. It has the ability to remind us that we should celebrate life while we’re alive to live it. Van Sant’s earlier films may have had a preoccupation with death but it’s only in Restless that he seems to have matured enough to accept it.
