★★
“Alone: the 1845 edition.”
This is based on the true story of Angelique Mott. In 1845, she and her husband Charlie were part of a prospecting expedition which landed on Isle Royale, an island in the middle of Lake Superior. The objective was to prospect for copper, and when their search was successful, the Motts were left to guard the claim, in the expectation they’d be there for only a couple of weeks, before being relieved. However, nobody showed up, and the couple were left to fend for themselves through a ferocious mid-Western winter. They ran entirely out of food before Christmas, but Angelique was not rescued until May, after more than ten months as a castaway – by which point, Charlie had passed away.
It’s an impressive story of wilderness survival, in the face of incredible hardship, so what went wrong here? It’s mostly the plotting, which manages to squander almost all the tension inherent in the story. As the tagline above suggests, we’re big fans of survival show Alone [albeit while sitting safely on the couch, munching Doritos and passing critical comment on the contestants’ fire-making skills], and I was hoping for something similar here. I mean, it’s reported that one of the ways she survived was “by pulling out her own hair, plaiting the strands, and creating snares with it, by which she caught rabbits.” That’s hard-core, and is the kind of detail which would have brought the move alive.
Instead, we get almost nothing about the details of how Angelique survives on a daily level. The film also makes it seem Isle Royale was tiny, but it’s actually over two hundred square miles in size – now, it has become the least visited national park in the continental US. Instead, we get a lot of the couple just sitting around, looking sadder and hungrier by the scene. Dramatic tension is limited to Charlie going a bit mad, which apparently did take place shortly before he died. I did wonder if, after his passing, Angelique was going to go all Uruguayan rugby team on him, but she just closes up the shack and moves into another shelter. [The ground was perhaps too hard for burial]
As something of a saving grace, the film does a good job building its characters. Angelique (Jones) is an interesting character, depicted here as a Christian, but one whose heritage was from the Ojibwe tribe. In particular, she’s shown as close to her grandmother (Young), giving her a mixed cultural identity. Charlie (Carrick) is less well-defined, though does have a very nice beard. The photography also helps, though it appears Thunder Bay in Ontario, stood in for the real Isle Royale. It still captures the terrible isolation and the ferocious climate, which explains why there has never been a permanent settlement established on the island. But this is not the story I wanted to see, and I don’t feel it does justice to the tenacity displayed by the real character.
Dir: Marie-Hélène Cousineau, Michelle Derosier
Star: Julia Jones, Charlie Carrick, Tantoo Cardinal, Aden Young