Three years ago Craig Zobel directed one of my least favorite movies: Compliance. Based on a true story, Compliance tells the story of a young woman who works at a fast-food restaurant who over the course of the film will be tormented and humiliated by her employer. This torment occurs because a man, posing as a police officer, calls the restaurant, and orders the woman to be searched, stripped, and more. It’s exploitative, rank cinema, meant to push the audience into complicity by being forced to helplessly watch it all unfold. Compliance achieves its ends so well that I cannot stand to think of the experience.
Zobel’s follow-up, Z for Zachariah releases this week. It is a slow film, beautifully photographed. There is no action, no perversity or exploitation; the conflict is all spiritual, emotional. Compliance is built around one idea, pushed relentlessly. It was not a good film but it was, reluctantly I admit it, a powerful one. Z for Zachariah is not a powerful movie, or a great movie. It is, instead, a thoughtful movie, built of many ideas. It is not like Compliance.
Z for Zachariah is a post-apocalyptic romance. Ann (Margot Robbie) lives alone in a fertile green valley, tending a garden, playing the organ in the little chapel on the grounds. The rest of the world has succumbed to disaster (presumably nuclear destruction). Into Ann’s valley walks a man in a fallout suit. Loomis (Chiwetel Ejiofor) was an engineer before the event that ended the world, but now he’s sick with radiation poisoning. Ann will take him in to her home, and together, the two will plan a future.
The relationship between Ann and Loomis develops slowly, sometimes painstakingly so. But it’s also a refreshing slowness. It allows Robbie to draw her religious past without condescension. She spends time in the old chapel her father preached in; she prays over her meals and shows gratitude to her god for her life. Zobel gives Ann decency in her faith; she doesn’t need Loomis to share it, though she wishes he did.
That slowness also allows Loomis to heal from his radiation sickness. He begins to explore the the valley’s potential as a place to start rebuilding humanity. A waterfall and a dead generator provide the potential for a waterwheel and electricity. Old gas pumps can be manually activated to provide power to the tractor and increase production on the land. More lives could be sustained.
Loomis and Ann don’t agree on why this fecund strip of earth was spared from destruction-she thinks it was God, he an isolated underwater aquifer-but neither finds the other’s answer problematic. They’re just glad to have found one another, and slowly, they start to fall in love.
image courtesy of Roadside Attractions
Eventually another man finds them, too. Caleb (Chris Pine) is a local miner. He was underground when the disaster hit and stayed under as long he had the food to survive. He comes in to the picture as a threat, but Loomis and Ann soon realize he is just another lost survivor.
Like Ann, Caleb is a man of God. Like Loomis, Caleb is a man. He too falls for Ann. And thus the fate of the last three people on earth will be hung upon their fleshly pursuits. The film plays this love triangle with the dour sense of reality. Even at the end of the world, it is our longing for love, and our jealousy, that will define our actions.
Caleb’s character does not appear in the novel that Z for Zachariah is based upon. The book is an exploration of and debate between Loomis’s scientific worldview and Ann’s religious faith. If you are looking for that story, you will not find it here. These elements exists in Zobel’s film but they are never elevated to the point of conflict, and this movie is better for it.
Instead, Z for Zachariah holds steadfastly to its set-up. This might be frustrating for some. The film, like the valley it inhabits, never really peaks. Instead Zobel goes for humanity stretched to its end through interiority and soft exchanges of dialogue. Ejiofor and Robbie have scenes together that carry the oddness of end times into their emotion. When Loomis gets drunk on warm beer and interprets Ann’s life through the candy she has eaten, we see how strange the world is when there is so little left of it.
This may be sci-fi but it feels more like a frontier, prairie story than an apocalypse. Nothing happens, but what else would you expect? The world has ended.
Z for Zachiariah opens today at the Minneapolis Film Society at St. Anthony Main.
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