So far it's been a strong year for movies both American and otherwise, but we're never safe from grating pseudo-profound parables about tragic destiny and redemptive second chances—a lesson drearily reiterated by Another Earth. The movie won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance, where it reportedly received a standing ovation (according to Variety), and was almost immediately picked up by major indie distributor Fox Searchlight—all of which suggest that some audiences are still taking one-note, morose performances, grainy handheld cinematography, and head-smackingly obvious metaphors as signs of profundity and creativity. Really, though, the only sign of uniqueness to be found anywhere in Another Earth is in its basic premise, and even this shard of originality is limited to a few luminescent shots of the titular earth doppelganger suspended in the sky.
Brit Marling (also credited as producer and cowriter) stars as Rhoda Williams, a promising 17-year-old astrophysics student who has just been accepted to MIT. On the night of her high school graduation, Rhoda celebrates excessively at a house party that's shown to us in obnoxious two-second snippets—director/editor Mike Cahill employs the laziest brand of "naturalism" imaginable, cutting so restlessly that we can only assume a longer stretch of continuity would reveal how unsuccessful he is at conveying human behavior (this is a conclusion we'll come to sooner or later anyway). Driving home, Rhoda hears a news story on the radio about the discovery of another planet: a second earth, suddenly discovered just outside of our own earth's atmosphere, with unknown physical properties. Drunkenly, Rhoda cranes her head out the car window and gazes at the parallel planet, majestic against the night sky. She crashes head-on into another car; a woman and her young son are killed instantly, while the man in the driver's seat is put into a coma. It's a sign of the movie's laziness that the family is blissfully chatting away about the name of the toy in the young boy's hands immediately before he's killed; this isn't just your average nuclear family, this is something so blissfully perfect it's destined for cruel annihilation at the hands of a sadistic Higher Being and an overly calculating writer/director.
Rhoda is sent to prison for four years for driving while intoxicated and vehicular manslaughter; when she's released, Brit Marling's dead-eyed stare (conveyed via shaky, grubby-looking shots of her character staring out of train windows while an aggressively somber score drones on the soundtrack—courtesy of a band named Fall On Your Sword, whose music is as bad as their name) tells us that Rhoda is, you know, sad. (Marling has been lauded for her performance, which is baffling—she operates on one unchanging wavelength for the entire movie. That's why we can't take her plight seriously—a performance that only aims for soul-crushing guilt can't even approach believability or empathy.) Rhoda takes a dreary janitorial job at a high school and eventually approaches the man whose life she ruined four years ago—the driver of the car she hit, a former composer named John Burroughs (William Mapother), who used to teach composition at Yale University. Another Earth is obviously concerned with the depression and hopelessness we all go through as everyday human beings, given that its two protagonists are once-promising intellectuals attached to MIT and Yale—does the movie assume we would be less interested in their difficult situations if they were just two hardworking nobodies, toiling away at nine-to-five jobs?
Anyway, Rhoda shows up at the home of Dr. Burroughs. She's rehearsed her apology, a confession that she hopes will alleviate some of her debilitating guilt. Suddenly face-to-face with the man whose wife and son she killed, though—he's now an alcoholic oaf in a refuse-stained bathrobe, a figure we might expect to see in an Off-Off-Off Broadway play about 1930s tenement dwellers—she pretends to be a consultant for a cleaning agency and offers to pick up his deteriorating home, free of charge. He accepts halfheartedly. She keeps on coming back, cleaning his house (get it, she cleans up his life!) and tearing up the checks he gives her afterwards. They develop an attachment somewhere between helpless desperation and genuine attachment, a relationship punctuated by clunky visual metaphors like one of Burroughs' deceased son's old T-shirts, which Rhoda absentmindedly sends through the wash, predictably instigating a feverish (but, needless to say, oh-so-humanly-imperfect) rant by Burroughs replete with twitching histrionics. This is the kind of movie in which no relationship can exist without a prop department's worth of meaningful things.
Four years after the discovery of that parallel planet, it's still unexplored when Rhoda is released from prison. Communications sent to Earth 2 have gone unanswered; no evidence has suggested that the planet is habitable, and it's never explained how or why the planet simply popped up right next door to ours'. (The whims of a lazy pair of melodramatists are the most likely explanation.) Actually, this vaguely sci-fi setup, which almost inadvertently raises a slew of metaphysical questions the movie never begins to explore, remains compelling for a while. Beyond its potency as a dreamy visual accent, the existence of Earth 2 makes you believe (or, at least, hope) that the movie is going in some promising directions. The best scene in Another Earth is a televised radio transmission from one of "our" NASA officials to a seemingly abandoned control center on Earth 2; suddenly, though, this official's radio call is answered—astonishingly, by her parallel self, her doppelganger, in this alternate universe. It's a tense, mysterious, unpretentious moment, and if the movie had at least touched upon some of the quandaries raised by this bizarre metaphysical moment, it would have at least been interesting.
But it becomes apparent almost immediately after this suspenseful scene that the ominous parallelism of Earth 2 simply exists as an allegory for the lame existential crises experienced by Rhoda and John. Rhoda is obsessed with the parallel planet; desperate for escape, and clinging to the possibility that, on Earth 2, her "other self" never drunkenly killed a woman and young boy, she enters a contest in which the winners will be chosen to join the first civilian excursion to Earth 2. Some of these parallelisms would have been intriguing if the movie had handled them with any dexterity, insight, compassion, or grace, but these are concepts that Cahill is apparently unaware of. Will Rhoda win the essay contest, in which she professes her guilt and asks, self-loathingly, for a second chance? How will the outcome of this affect her relationship with John? Will she have an epiphany and realize the true emotional value of the tragedy that she has undergone—a realization complete with a frenzied scene in which Rhoda runs at breakneck speed at the side of the road to overcome her guilt, a scene which surely must have had Cahill shedding a single tear behind the camera? Since the movie won esteem at the Sundance Film Festival, the answers to all of those questions should be easy to guess.
Levity, spontaneity, originality—these are things that Another Earth is unconcerned with. It's so desperate to prove itself as something deep, something real, something important that it ends up as something diametrically opposite. This is a common tendency among first time directors (Another Earth is Cahill's first feature film), but at least sometimes we can acknowledge and understand this tendency (the attempt to make a mark in a film industry that's dauntingly hard to break in to) and recognize the natural skills, technical or otherwise, of the woman or man behind the camera. Not so in this case: judging from Another Earth, Cahill has no promising tricks or ideas or sentiments in his arsenal.
Am I being too hard on him, and on Another Earth? The movie is bad, but after all, it's just a typical American indie drama, one of many trite, lifeless, self-involved, precious cinematic dirges that find success at Sundance or Tribeca—no better or worse than most. The answer is yes, I am being too hard on the movie and on Cahill—because my frustration should be directed towards American independent cinema in general, not primarily at the filmmakers but, just as importantly, at the distributors and film programmers and industry "pundits" and scenesters and marketers who take this as something valuable, who give it a standing ovation, who put this forward as something we should celebrate as emblematic of American independent moviemaking. Give Cahill and Another Earth's crew credit for one thing: they've made an industry believe they're seeing something new and enlightening. This means the shame should be placed on the movers and shakers (the ones who decide which movies are picked up for distribution—which movies American audiences will see) who have bought into Another Earth's dog-and-pony show. They see grainy handheld cinematography, vacant and morose stares from attractive newcomers, and stories revolving around a distinctly non-humanistic pain and suffering and, desperate to pitch ticket-buyers that new underdog success story, see something worth selling. At least Hollywood knows what it's selling: brand merchandise that may not give consumers nutrition but, a lot of the time, gives them entertainment. Indie distributors like Fox Searchlight (which, needless to say, operates at the behest of 20th Century Fox—about as far from independent as you can get) pitch us gourmet organic food and then regurgitate slop onto movie screens.
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