Adrift amid marriage, murder

Director Kathryn Bigelow has always seemed an uneasy fit with the American movie industry. Part of this discomfort is the chilliness of her touch, the almost aggressive lack of emotional heat we expect in our movies. Then there’s the fact that the film business is not disposed to women directors who don’t work for easy laughs. There is nothing frivolous or ingratiating about Bigelow’s finest films or her most seductive characters, all of whom -- the cowboy vampires of “Near Dark,” a guardian angel named Mace in “Strange Days” -- share with the director an unwavering purposefulness. Even when they’re coaxing laughter from their nightmares, these are characters who take themselves very seriously.

Bigelow’s last film, the submarine thriller “K-19: The Widowmaker,” released in July, is the second of two recent features she’s directed about characters confined to close quarters while aboard a ship, which could be a metaphor but is likely just chance. The earlier feature, a drama based on the Anita Shreve novel “The Weight of Water,” is only now receiving a U.S. release, more than two years after its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. Awkwardly framed by two separate narrative strands, the film combines a 19th century true-crime mystery with the unraveling of a contemporary marriage, an uncharacteristic choice of material for a genre director who favors bold strokes and has a talent for setting bodies in violent motion.

Photographer Jean Janes (Catherine McCormack), her Pulitzer Prize-winning poet husband (Sean Penn), her brother-in-law (Josh Lucas) and his new girlfriend (Elizabeth Hurley) sail to the Isles of Shoals off the Maine coast to research a century-old murder. In 1873, a Norwegian immigrant, Maren Hontvedt (Sarah Polley), had been the sole witness to the frenzied slaying of her older sister (the late Katrin Cartlidge) and sister-in-law (Vinessa Shaw). Joylessly married to a fisherman (Ulrich Thomsen) who applies the same grim determination to his trade as he does to fulfilling his conjugal duties, Maren has endured years of near-solitude when her sister arrives from Norway. Sometime later, the household swells to include a Prussian boarder (Ciaran Hinds), Maren’s brother (Anders W. Berthelsen) and his new bride.

Shreve embroiders the historical record with fabricated evidence in the novel, restlessly moving between the past and the present until they blur together.

Although the Prussian was hanged for the crime, Shreve is less concerned with who swung the ax than why. For her, the great mystery of the murders is the island’s otherworldly women, in particular Maren, a creature whose psychological opacity makes her the sort of blank slate upon which authors are so fond of scribbling their ideas. For her part, Bigelow has said she was drawn to the book because her mother comes from Norwegian stock, but a more persuasive explanation may have been the appeal of exploring the darker side of female desire, a shadowy area only glanced on in her previous films.

In her telling of this complicated story, Bigelow handles the flashback sequences adroitly, even though she never manages to surmount the intrinsic dreariness of their sub-Bergman despair. Yet if the past quivers to tepid life, there’s simply no saving the present-day drama, which, despite the attractive presence of McCormack and Lucas, is overwhelmed by Penn and Hurley’s dueling histrionics.

Scowling his way forward and aft, Penn’s swaggering macho genius is as dated as his Elvis pompadour and only slightly less silly than Hurley’s strenuous vamping, which finds her alternately melting ice cubes over her overheated body and lustily slurping on lobster legs.

If Penn and Hurley are too loud for the story’s subtleties, it’s because Bigelow’s penchant for action over introspection doesn’t make sense for a drama hinged on such unreliable, emotionally repressed narrators. Part of the problem is that Alice Arlen and Christopher Kyle’s screenplay is so faithful to Shreve’s novel that it fails to transcend the book’s obscure point of view and the falsity of its parallel narrative.

“The Weight of Water” depends on a seamless integration of Jean and Maren’s stories for the larger narrative to work -- but even with Bigelow’s fluid editing, the strands never convincingly plait together. No matter how deep her hurt, Jean and her insecurities make for an impoverished counterpoint to the tragedy of a woman imprisoned by history as well as by madness, an imbalance underscored with each cut from all the dank Nordic repression to the gaseous New England whining.

Bigelow has always had a difficult time keeping a handle on her characters’ passions, especially when it comes to the sort of quieter emotions that fall with tears rather than with blood. Her characters often seem designed to express themselves through their fists, and that may be one reason why she’s at her most comfortable in action-oriented genres. (They’re also easier to get made.)

One of the surplus pleasures of her work is how it consistently defies expectations about the stories a female director is supposed to tell. The thing is, all that time spent in male company may have ill prepared her for characters who don’t necessarily behave the way men are supposed to.

There’s nothing fainthearted about the way Bigelow attacks the screen (her background is as an Abstract Expressionist painter). As a director, she knows how to get out of the house, but she can be impatient when it comes to humdrum reality. That may account for her interest in Shreve’s novel, with its epic tragedies, and it may help to explain the misguided casting of Penn and Hurley, each of whom comes equipped with an oversized personality.

But for “The Weight of Water” to stay afloat, everyone and everything would have to be scaled to human size. The characters would have to face their demons without the crutch of violence, and they would have to trade in some of the director’s unyielding determination for a more flexible sense of how to survive the here and now. In other words, they would have to live in the world, not just fight it.

*

‘The Weight of Water’

MPAA rating: R for violence, sexuality and nudity, and brief language.

Times guidelines: Some nudity and sexual suggestiveness; the murders are swift but brutal.

Catherine McCormack...Jean Janes

Sarah Polley...Maren Hontvedt

Sean Penn...Thomas Janes

Josh Lucas...Rich Janes

StudioCanal presents a Manifest Films Co., Palomar Pictures and Miracle Pictures presentation, released by Lions Gate. Director Kathryn Bigelow. Writers Alice Arlen and Christopher Kyle. Based on the novel by Anita Shreve. Producers A. Kitman Ho, Sigurjon Sighvatsson and Janet Yang. Director of photography Adrian Biddle. Editor Howard E. Smith. Production designer Karl Juliusson. Costumes Marit Allen. Music David Hirschfelder. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

In limited release.