June 3–10, 1999

movie shorts

Limbo

John Sayles takes a step into the realm of art film with this unusually elliptical and open-ended story of people stuck between a past they can’t escape and a future they don’t want to consider. David Strathairn stars as an Alaskan fisherman haunted by a fatal mistake twenty-five years in his past, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is an itinerant saloon singer who keeps falling for the wrong guys, subjecting her daughter to a string of unstable living situations. Perhaps the most significant detail in Limbo is that the daughter, played by Lone Star’s Vanessa Martinez, is a "cutter", who slices her arm with razor blades to make up for the lack of real feeling in her life. Sayles’ movies have always been plot-driven, and characters have turned their anger against others; this is the first example I can think of a Sayles character lashing out at herself, and it’s a startling, quiet detail. The title refers to the characters emotional stasis, a stasis which is broken when the three abruptly become stranded in the Alaskan wilderness more than an hour into the movie. With its unresolved grace note of an ending, Limbo is not Sayles’ most satisfying film, and its abrupt shift in tone can be quite jarring. But the magnificent Strathairn, a Sayles regular, does much with a character of few words, in a drama that is not afraid to ask questions for which there are no answers.

—Sam Adams