Roadside Attractions
I’ve often opined on the difficulty of adapting books into movies. It’s tricky when you’re doing something timeless or very period specific, that can fail just as easily as it can succeed. But it’s even harder when you try to adapt something written decades ago with specific cultural contexts into a modern movie. It doesn’t always work. I’ve gone back and forth on this particular movie, but for me it comes back to one nagging detail: What’s the point?
Z for Zachariah comes from indie director Craig Zobel and is based on the sci-fi book of the same name by Robert C. O’Brien that was published after his death in 1974. It’s not a particularly long book, but it’s complex enough to have quite a lot written about its themes and ideas. There are a few changes from the book to the movie, but I will ignore those because I haven’t read the book so I don’t feel like I have a good enough perspective to speak to it. In a post-apocalyptic America, young Ann Burden (Margot Robbie) lives in an isolated valley that somehow avoided the implied destruction of everything else. She lives simply and alone, and the only way we learn about her is to watch her. There is no voiceover or narration, so everything stays with her face and actions.
Shockingly, she stumbles across another surviving person, John Loomis (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a wandering scientist who has been sickened by radiation poisoning. His mad relief at finding a place free of radioactivity is stirring to watch, and a reminder of why Chiwetel Ejiofor should have won the Oscar for 12 Years a Slave. The two form a tentative bond after she helps tend to his illness, as Loomis is able to use his technical knowledge to improve conditions, fixing things, and coming up with useful ideas. As to be expected, the two tiptoe around a mutual attraction that is assisted by two things: 1) They are the only living people they’ve seen in years and 2) They are both good looking. So it goes for a while, perhaps a bit too long, but that’s setting the stage for a shake-up.
A new man shows up, a handsome stranger named Caleb (Chris Pine). So immediately there’s a rapport between Anne and Caleb, which although is acted well and makes sense logically speaking, moved like molasses. The film goes into the very indie territory of long shots of people’s faces watching other people, and long stretches of slowly building tension. To me, it’s a bit too slow, and the beauty of the film becomes a bit muted when measured against the lack of anything happening for much of it. The three people here don’t have much in the way of developed personalities, so it’s nearly all reliant on their acting to tell us something about them.
They do their best, but it’s limited; it’s hard to see Anne as anything other than “plucky young pretty girl” and Caleb as anything other than “mysterious handsome stranger.” Loomis has a bit more depth, but he has more conflicting emotions and difficult choices to make. This is not a sci-fi movie with anything that looks sci-fi; it’s dirty and horrifying in its simplicity. When the book was written in the 70s, the spectre of nuclear annihilation was still omnipresent. Although people still fear it today, the theme of that fear isn’t quite as connective to the modern audience. This isn’t the Hunger Games love triangle, it’s a thousand times more subtle and slow.
I suppose my main issue with the film is that we didn’t really get inside anyone’s head, which I have to assume is different from the novel. This means that there’s a lot to me that’s wasted effort in showing more beautiful scenery, which makes it very slow and more like a nature documentary. But if you like a slow, meaningful indie drama with not a lot of talking but a lot acting instead and pretty vistas, then, well … this could your sort of movie. But it’s not a classic kind of love triangle, it’s slow and careful. Not really my kind of movie, but I can’t say it’s bad.
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