June 3–10, 1999

movies

Silent Strength

John Sayles talks about Limbo, his most visually driven movie ever.

by Sam Adams

In the world of independent film, John Sayles is the closest thing to a patron saint. In the past two decades, Sayles has made nearly a dozen films without studio support, deviating only with 1983’s Baby, It’s You – an experience Sayles has vowed never to repeat. Earning his living as a well-paid Hollywood script doctor, including substantial work on Apollo 13, Sayles has poured his earnings back into his movies, allowing him to take risks like filming 1997’s Men with Guns in Spanish with a cast composed largely of nonprofessional actors. Still living in Hoboken with his companion and producing partner Maggie Renzi, Sayles seems to have carved himself the perfect niche, an ideal compromise between artistic purity and material security.

But while Sayles’ iconic status is deserved, it’s also constricting. Sayles’ ideals may not have changed since he prepped The Return of the Secaucus Seven while writing Piranha for Roger Corman, but his filmmaking certainly has. Perhaps the most damning criticism of Sayles’ oeuvre came from Pauline Kael, who accused him, essentially, of being a novelist in filmmaker’s clothing. "[Sayles] gains nothing from using film as his medium," she concluded.

But if that were true once, it’s certainly become less so since Sayles’ twin breakthroughs of the early ’90s: 1991’s City of Hope and 1992’s Passion Fish. In City of Hope, Sayles’ most rawly shot film, Sayles used a large cast and street-level urgency to profile an urban center in a state of spiraling decline, and Passion Fish showed a new visual sophistication, with elegant dissolves and filtered light lending poignancy to the story of two women brought together by tragedy.

Limbo, which recently premiered at Cannes, shows Sayles moving further in the direction of visually driven storytelling. Shot on location in southeastern Alaska, it’s the story of a washed-up fisherman (David Strathairn), a rootless saloon singer (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and her sullen daughter (Vanessa Martinez) whose lives have, for different reasons, lost all direction. But after circumstances leave the three stranded and faced with death, they begin, slowly, to rediscover meaning in life, mindful that it may be the last thing they ever learn.

Since Secaucus Seven, Sayles has unfailingly shot his films in the areas where they are set, with the sole exception of the period piece Eight Men Out. In many cases, such as Limbo and Men With Guns, Sayles’ refusal to substitute locations has meant substantial expense and logistical difficulties, but Sayles – perhaps like a novelist – insists that his stories don’t exist outside of the communities where they are set.

On the phone from Los Angeles, he elaborates: "The place that the characters live affects what people do for a living, how they feel about themselves, what the sociology is, the racial mix, all kinds of things that really have to get into the story."

Sayles sees Alaska, particularly the southeast, as frontier country, like the borderline Texas of Lone Star, a fact that underlines the characters’ inability to move from one emotional state to the next.

"We had traveled in Alaska about 11 years ago, and I was struck by two things," he recalls. "The first was just how close civilization and big nature were to each other; you could take a 10-minute walk from downtown Juneau and get eaten by a bear. Most capital cities you can’t do that unless you wander into the wrong cage at the zoo. But also I was struck by how it really is a frontier. It has the sense of promise… that people [can] do something or be something they never could have been in the lower 48. They don’t check your pedigree when you come."

That sense of mobility is juxtaposed against the stasis of Limbo’s main trio of characters, particularly Strathairn’s and Mastrantonio’s, who are so haunted by past mistakes that they have worked themselves into a kind of emotional coma. Strathairn’s character, says Sayles, "is a guy who took risks and lost big, and his reaction to that is to not take them again, emotionally or physically."

Perhaps because he’s as interested in communities as individuals, Sayles often likes to suggest that his stories go on after the theater lights come up. Limbo has drawn particular attention for its lack of a traditional resolution – the New York Times devoted an entire article to the subject of the film’s open-ended conclusion. Sayles, not surprisingly, rejects the notion that the film has "no ending": "It has a very definite ending in my mind," he counters, "just not a conventional one. It’s about these people who are stuck, running in circles, and I feel that by the end of the movie, you feel like their limbo is about to end, one way or the other."

That ending, says Sayles, was in his mind from the beginning, as was the abrupt shift in tone that occurs midway through the movie. From a multi-character drama that seems to echo Lone Star’s concerns about history and community, Limbo shifts without warning into a bare-bones three-character drama, from sociology to psychology. In a more conventionally structured film, Limbo’s first hour would have been compressed into an opening montage, where the characters are quickly sketched before galloping off to be tested. But for Sayles, it’s impossible to understand characters without first becoming familiar with where they come from, which accounts for Limbo’s perhaps overly long first section. "To know people," he says, "I want to see them in their society. These three people are all outsiders in a way, and we need to see the world that they’re excluded from."

While Sayles still has his roots in meat-and-potatoes storytelling, it might be fair to call Limbo his first art film. But Sayles bridles at the suggestion that his early movies were visually unsophisticated, and, well, wordy. "Certainly the more money you have, the more of the story you can tell visually. I’ve been able to buy music, to work with really amazing cinematographers, I’ve been able to paint a building – I mean, we didn’t paint a wall until my fourth or fifth movie." But the conversational mode of the early films wasn’t about talk being cheaper, he says. "That was who those characters were. In those early movies, the fact that people were talking was more important than what they were saying. It wasn’t just about plot."

Still, many of Limbo’s strongest moments are those in which no one is talking at all, and it does seem that Sayles, who has always been a talented wordsmith, has added a new weapon to his arsenal: silence.

See Sam Adams’ review of Limbo.