There’s an innate novelty to Ron Howard directing a film like Eden, and it’s disingenuous not to mention it. The filmmaker has by all reasonable benchmarks — fame, box office, industry awards — had one of the most celebrated careers in Hollywood history, yet is still widely dismissed in critical circles (when Paul Thomas Anderson named Howard’s previous film, Thirteen Lives, as his favorite movie of 2022, it was treated almost as an unquantifiable quirk, akin to Terrence Malick loving Zoolander). Befitting someone of his sustained success, there’s never been a question of Howard’s talent behind the camera; he’s a classic journeyman director in the old studio mode who’s made films across nearly every genre and whose tendency to “hide the brush strokes” means his work is always in service of the material, rarely calls attention to itself. Really, it’s always been a matter of his instincts, which are unfailingly rousing, and his taste in subject matter, which tends towards the squishy (and even when he’s “gone dark” in the past, as with his lost-to-time western The Missing, it’s always felt performative). So saying that Eden, a fact-based crime drama set in the Galapagos Islands, feels “nothing like a Ron Howard film” can be interpreted as measured praise and a little unfair to a director who should be recognized for evolving as an artist (albeit belatedly).
Defining exactly why this feels so different is the tricky bit though. It’s not as simple as “the film is filled with sex and violence,” as though the director were a Puritan before now (mutilation and sexual violence hang like a dark cloud over the aforementioned The Missing, and something like Rush featured plenty of beautiful people hopping in and of bed). Rather, it’s that Eden is laser-focused on depicting the ghoulish events that befell three groups of Europeans in the 1930s who attempted to settle Floreana, an uninhabited island located off the coast of Ecuador. And, perhaps feeling liberated by the historical record, there’s little indication that Howard is searching out a silver lining to temper the tragedy. After opening with audio of Hitler under expository title cards to set the stage for the rise of fascism (an admittedly inauspicious note for a director prone to obviousness), we’re introduced to the humorless German philosopher Dr. Friedrich Ritter (Jude Law, reveling in the character’s officiousness) and his equally severe domestic partner, Dore Strauch (Vanessa Kirby, serving magnificent side-eye in an underutilized role). Believing that the government of Germany — and in a macro-sense, the world at large — is on the brink of collapse, Ritter and Dore have relocated to the tiny tropical island in the Pacific Ocean, making it their private dominion. Adamant that the tropical climate will cure Dore’s multiple sclerosis and provide the sort of isolation Friedrich demands to write his manuscript, a heavy philosophy tome that aspires to no less than saving the world from its own dark impulses, the couple has seemingly found a slice of heaven all to themselves (not that either would allow themselves to acknowledge the afterlife). Yet Friedrich’s correspondences, published in the papers back home, have inspired disaffected WWI veteran Heinz Wittmer (Daniel Brühl) and his young bride Margret (Sydney Sweeney, the only American in the cast and thus the most susceptible to mockery for her attempt at a German accent) to themselves travel across the world to relocate to Floreana along with Heinz’s adolescent son from an earlier marriage in the hopes of finding a fresh start. Expecting to be greeted warmly as fellow countrymen, the Wittmers are instead met with scorn and dismissal, with Friedrich quickly banishing them to a barren side of the island (ostensibly to be nearer to a meager fresh water source) and the expectation that they won’t be able to cultivate food, eventually starving and tucking tail back to Europe.
The final game piece introduced to the board is Baroness Eloise von Wagner Bosquet (Ana de Armas), an aspiring hotel magnate and con artist who dreams of building a luxury resort on Floreana that caters exclusively to millionaires, despite her lacking a background in construction or the resources required to execute her plan. The Baroness is a demonstrably unserious person even before the details of her dubious business venture are elucidated; the character is shown being carried in from the sea — like royalty! — on the shoulders of her engineer and bodyguard (Felix Kammerer and Toby Wallace), who also take turns sharing her bed. The film never misses an opportunity to emphasize the Baroness as a lightweight, whether that be completely missing the point of allegedly her favorite book, The Picture of Dorian Gray, or speaking largely in proto-self-help affirmations like “the only difference between fear and courage is conviction.” Her principal weapon is her sex appeal, and when she coquettishly shows up at Ritter’s makeshift cottage to try and worm her way into his good graces, he rips away the upper hand by greeting her with his penis hanging out (it’s a credit to both the actor and the film that zero effort is made to preserve Law’s modesty).
And so begins a series of triangulations and jockeying for power between forces of chaotic good and chaotic evil, with the resourceful and hardworking Wittmers stuck in the middle and unsure which side is which. And that, to be clear, is the point of the film. The principled-to-a-fault Ritter is revealed as having fairly transactional morality while his self-seriousness disguises some pretty questionable beliefs (the character prattles on that democracy invariably leads to fascism and then war, which sounds like something workshopped on a college quad before being dismissed as inane). Proxy skirmishes and psychological warfare ensues, particularly as resources become scarce in the arid summer months with incursions and raids becoming more brazen as hunger sets in (amongst her many failings, the Baroness refuses to eat food grown on the island). And all the while, Heinz and Margret prosper (comparatively at least) simply by tending to their land, keeping their heads down, and practicing a modicum of diplomacy while the capitalist and the intellectual find themselves at each other’s throats. But the center cannot hold, and the small island doesn’t have enough resources to support all of these people; at a certain point it becomes a question of how one reduces the numbers.
The most eyebrow-raising decision here is casting Sweeney, a thoroughly modern performer — more a va-va-voom screen presence than an actor — as not only a simple German woman from the first half of the 20th century, but as the moral center of the film. The vagaries of securing financing notwithstanding, it’s difficult to say Sweeney snugly fits this milieu, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a certain logic to the decision. Part of the reason the Baroness’ feminine wiles are so ineffective — de Armas is regularly costumed in loosely fastened silk robes and practically translucent blouses — on Heinz is that Margret looks the way that she does. But it’s more than sex appeal; there’s a real physicality to Sweeney, who probably does anguished exertion and delirious panic as well as any actor of her generation. Ironically, this is the second time this year Sweeney’s been asked to give birth under duress on screen (infamously, in the closing moments of Immaculate as well), and while it’s a fairly narrow lane, it’s undeniable she has a real knack for it.
That labor scene, which involves packs of wild dogs snapping at Margret’s heels and armed looters ignoring her anguished screams for help, is indicative of Howard’s overall approach to the subject matter: unblinking preoccupation with savagery. The film is punctuated with nature shots of avian predators carrying off prey and the bleached skeletons of dead animals rotting in the sun. Eden, which substitutes Queensland, Australia for Floreana — although technically an independent production, there’s incalculable production value here in shooting on location — presents paradise as a visually foreboding stretch of land, drained of color and enveloped by fog rolling down from the mountains. But the true savagery is, of course, embodied in our characters who, for all their high-minded ideals and nods to culture, are reduced to paranoia, back-biting, scheming, and barbarism. It’s a tale as old as time and would feel familiar in its shape even were it not based on actual events, but there are real teeth to many of Howard’s choices here, including the staging of a knife fight that recalls the most famous scene from Eastern Promises (yes, that one) and whipping the audience into a bloodlust that finds us welcoming one of our main characters getting their brains blown out on camera. Even its macabre postscript can’t help but twist the knife as it relates to the fate of one of the film’s supporting characters while furthering the tit-for-tat even beyond the events of the island. Is this the sort of tale of paradise lost that’s innately compelling, regardless of who’s behind the camera (and true to form, Howard is simply staying out of the way), or has the filmmaker tapped into the same dark impulses as his mild-mannered characters — and is the revelation that it resides within him what secretly gives the film its charge? However fleeting it may end up being, it feels as though a door inside the director has been nudged open and someone who isn’t hamstrung by the need to reach as large an audience as possible has walked through. For better or worse, this feels like the work of a free man.
Published as part if TIFF 2024 — Dispatch 3.
