Weight of Water (the movie)
Academy-award winning director Kathryn Bigelow is best known for visually exciting ultra-action films like Point Break, Strange Days, and The Hurt Locker. Her fans and critics were not sure what to make of the film version of the Anita Shreve novel Weight of Water, with its dueling plots and slow pacing. Was it an art film, an historical or psychological drama, a thriller or an action film?
After a lackluster response at the Toronto Film Festival in 2000, the movie circulated around Europe in search of a distributor. It was finally released at a handful of American theaters in 2002 and sank like a stone. Not even the presence of actor Sean Penn or a half-naked Elizabeth Hurley could save the Weight of Water movie in its original theatrical release. The estimated $16 million budget returned only a few hundred thousand dollars at the box office according to published reports.
But every movie gets a second chance on video, and many online reviews have given the film "thumbs up." For students of the Wagner case, Bigelow's film is a rare opportunity to see the 1873 story brought to life in living color and Dolby digital sound. A host of talented film professionals were employed to recreate authentic period clothing, props, hairstyles, and even speech patterns and dialect. Studio carpenters built a full-sized replica of the two-story Hontvet House on Taylor Island in Nova Scotia where scenes from Weight of Water were filmed. The barren rocky site, not far from Halifax, looks similar to Smuttynose, but because it is connected to the mainland by a causeway, the island was more convenient for filming. When shooting was over, the duplicate Red House was dismantled and trucked away.
The film opens dramatically in the streets of Portsmouth, New Hampshire as Louis Wagner shouts "I'm innocent!" amid the din of the howling lynch mob. John and Ivan Hontvet, both played by Danish actors, usher Maren into the Portsmouth jail. Wagner, played by Irish- born Ciaran Hinds, is wild-eyed and frenzied. Unlike the smooth-shaven, charming, and well-dressed historical Wagner, the fictional character wears a ragged beard, long disheveled hair, and a coarse fisherman's outfit. He is supposed to look guilty in service to the twisted fictionalized plot. Maren Hontvet is played brilliantly, critics agreed, by the highly-respected and expressive Canadian actor Sarah Polley.
The real Louis Wagner, hanged for murder in 1875, would be thrilled with Weight of Water. The dark and vindictive conspiracy theory that he concocted alone in a tiny Maine jail cell has now been spread across the globe. It has been translated into foreign tongues and projected larger-than-life onto motion picture screens. It is, at this moment, being downloaded onto television sets and portable media players. In the creative and skillful hands of Anita Shreve and Kathryn Bigelow, the false "Maren theory" reached its high water mark. But even as we are being seduced by great actors, and even when those actors are reciting, line-for-line, the exact words spoken by the historical characters they represent, we need to pinch ourselves and remember -- it's only a movie.
(c) 2015 by J. Dennis Robinson, adapted from Mystery on the Isles of Shoals, Skyhorse Publishing. All rights reserved. Also available from Audible.com.
After a lackluster response at the Toronto Film Festival in 2000, the movie circulated around Europe in search of a distributor. It was finally released at a handful of American theaters in 2002 and sank like a stone. Not even the presence of actor Sean Penn or a half-naked Elizabeth Hurley could save the Weight of Water movie in its original theatrical release. The estimated $16 million budget returned only a few hundred thousand dollars at the box office according to published reports.
But every movie gets a second chance on video, and many online reviews have given the film "thumbs up." For students of the Wagner case, Bigelow's film is a rare opportunity to see the 1873 story brought to life in living color and Dolby digital sound. A host of talented film professionals were employed to recreate authentic period clothing, props, hairstyles, and even speech patterns and dialect. Studio carpenters built a full-sized replica of the two-story Hontvet House on Taylor Island in Nova Scotia where scenes from Weight of Water were filmed. The barren rocky site, not far from Halifax, looks similar to Smuttynose, but because it is connected to the mainland by a causeway, the island was more convenient for filming. When shooting was over, the duplicate Red House was dismantled and trucked away.
The film opens dramatically in the streets of Portsmouth, New Hampshire as Louis Wagner shouts "I'm innocent!" amid the din of the howling lynch mob. John and Ivan Hontvet, both played by Danish actors, usher Maren into the Portsmouth jail. Wagner, played by Irish- born Ciaran Hinds, is wild-eyed and frenzied. Unlike the smooth-shaven, charming, and well-dressed historical Wagner, the fictional character wears a ragged beard, long disheveled hair, and a coarse fisherman's outfit. He is supposed to look guilty in service to the twisted fictionalized plot. Maren Hontvet is played brilliantly, critics agreed, by the highly-respected and expressive Canadian actor Sarah Polley.
The real Louis Wagner, hanged for murder in 1875, would be thrilled with Weight of Water. The dark and vindictive conspiracy theory that he concocted alone in a tiny Maine jail cell has now been spread across the globe. It has been translated into foreign tongues and projected larger-than-life onto motion picture screens. It is, at this moment, being downloaded onto television sets and portable media players. In the creative and skillful hands of Anita Shreve and Kathryn Bigelow, the false "Maren theory" reached its high water mark. But even as we are being seduced by great actors, and even when those actors are reciting, line-for-line, the exact words spoken by the historical characters they represent, we need to pinch ourselves and remember -- it's only a movie.
(c) 2015 by J. Dennis Robinson, adapted from Mystery on the Isles of Shoals, Skyhorse Publishing. All rights reserved. Also available from Audible.com.
