Restless | Review

In line with career paths of many American auteurs, Gus Van Sant makes a living off of alternating between filming austere passion projects, and succumbing to mainstream tastes. Restless marks his second straight film in the latter category, though it won’t follow Milk ‘s stream into awards season contention. Sweet-natured and ultimately inoffensive, Van Sant’s newest seems targeted at appealing to a teenage twee crowd, which becomes clearest by the time the first of three of Sufjan Stevens’ sappiest songs crackles into the soundtrack. Addressing gravely serious themes of mortality with an airily positive flair, it’s a competently made yet forgettable dosage of angel dust. Let’s pull for a big financial payday in hopes of a more personal and ambitious follow-up from the former Palme d’Or winner.

The sentimentally morbid storyline kicks off at a funeral, where Enoch (Henry Hopper) first meets the cute but sickly Anna (Mia Wasikowska). The two bond over their first-base philosophies on death and the afterlife, and friendship quickly evolves into young love. Both kids have fairly tragic circumstances from the past that help give credence to their hobby, but it is a stretch for these two attractive and friendly anti-goths to end up as such loners. Enoch’s situation involves the death of his parents via car crash, turning him into an apathetic, albeit chic, rebel. Stranger, though, is that his only friend, Hiroshi, is the ghost of a kamikaze pilot from WWII. The two play Battleship together (it’s this generation’s chess, apparently), and Hiroshi gets inexplicably jealous when Enoch gets a love interest.

Anna’s affliction is more dire, though, as she has terminal cancer – only three months to live when she meets Enoch – prompting her to search for connections to nature and, inevitably, an afterlife. All things considered, she is impossibly sprightly and optimistic (think Rachel Weisz’s naively ‘death-is-okay-I’m-not-worried’ character from at The Fountain), creating a character that is too good-natured for her own good.

Cinematically speaking, everything suffices in the most conventional senses. The digitally shot feature was filtered into a sepia-tinted color palette that heavy-handedly evokes autumn, aiming to Romanticize the characters’ maturity and approach to such exigently dealt hands in life. These guys don’t have time for any hedonistic Spring fever, they’ve got a funeral to catch.

Adding to the film’s humble sensibility is Danny Elfman’s pedestrian score, serving as a cherubic backdrop for our lovestruck necromaniacs. It is serviceable, however, going down like candy, bailed out by classic downers by the Beatles and Nico, arriving ready for enforcement straight from Wes Anderson’s arsenal.

Neither as risqué as To Die For, nor as disposable as Finding Forester, Restless sits as a sensitive curio in respect to Van Sant’s oeuvre. With his award-winning ‘death trilogy’ still clearly visible in the rear-view mirror, this is a more syrupy spoonful of that same theme – one he seems ready to apply to just about any genre, no matter the artistic merit.

2011 Cannes Int. Film Festival – Un Certain Regard.

May 12th.

Rating 2.5 stars