A life’s linearity is only a biproduct of meticulously constructed narrative. In hindsight, things seem straightforward: clinging to your older sister’s pantlegs, you survive a childhood in the margins around your abusive father. You make it out, somehow, but not without fostering a hunger for drugs and alcohol. Those substances eventually derail the college career you funded with a scholarship for swimming, your deepest passion. To cope, you turn to writing. It turns out you’ve got a knack for it. You join workshops, start publishing stories, teach a class or two. After a DUI, it’s time to put your drinking days behind you. You clean up your act, keep writing, and conduct your own workshops, where you meet your partner, with whom you start a family. It’s a story simple enough to feel quaint; internally, though, that collection of wounds and reconstructions are less a straight line than a knotty, unknowable tangle.
“I thought about starting at the beginning, but that’s not how I remember it,” says The Chronology of Water’s Lidia (Imogen Poots). “It’s all a series of fragments. Repetitions. Pattern formations.” Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut is an adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of the same name, a brutal account of a life and identity built from a web of collected traumas. Like Yuknavitch’s book, Stewart’s adaptation is an exercise in poetics that largely subverts the traditional structure of autobiography. Its scenes, shot on 16mm with the intimacy of a shuddered breath, are strung together like the flashes of a synapse, barely reined in by their own shared history.
On screen, Kristen Stewart’s post-Twilight arthouse pivot is branded by staccato physicality and cadences that threaten to burst open at the promise of a breeze; to watch her act can sometimes feel like watching a bird trapped under a bedsheet. The Chronology of Water never finds Stewart in front of the camera, but those sensibilities — a brittle and waning control against a dam of internality — are bold enough to make you question whether Lidia’s whispered narration is Stewart’s own. In fact, we don’t hear Lidia speak for the first 20 minutes of the movie; until then, we’re offered only the fragmented musings and mumbled poetry of her voiceover.
Before she speaks, Lidia collects abuses like so many coins in a bank: her father (Michael Epp) wields his severity like a feral cat, pounding walls, threatening his family, and, in moments graciously left off screen, assaulting his daughters at night. When the levee finally breaks — 18 years of brutality wound cancerous around her organs — Lidia spits out her first line as if it were bile. “Fuck you, motherfucker,” she growls at her father before his fist takes an arc toward her jaw.
Freeing her voice opens Lidia’s world, exposing the fresh wound of her childhood to life’s open air. In college, Lidia drinks without limit. She meets Phillip (“I wish I could apologize to you,” her voiceover whispers), a boy patient enough to corral the self that Lidia works to unsheathe. Until she flunks out, Lidia makes a blur of herself across campus, spitting and fighting and careening into oblivion. The pool is her only net, and, eventually, even swimming can’t contain the hurt she carries.
It takes a presence as cockeyed and gonzo as Lidia’s own bruised upbringing to bring her back to herself. After leaving competitive swimming and college behind, Lidia Yuknavitch’s writing eventually brought her under the tutelage of Ken Kesey. The merry prankster–turned–elder statesman never got out from under the thumb of his own substance abuse, nor, in The Chronology of Water, does he try to set Lidia straight. Instead, he meets her where she stands: within a cloud of smoke that, thick as it is, can’t quite seem to blot out Lidia’s hunger and curiosity. In real life, Kesey’s mentorship proved pivotal toward the trajectory of Lidia’s career; in The Chronology of Water, his presence offers a critical bit of levity.
Kristen Stewart matches Lidia and Kesey’s stranger-than-fiction relationship with a bit of casting as inspired as it is brazenly unexpected: she lends the role of the Cuckoo’s Nest author to Jim Belushi. It’s a risky bet that pays off in spades. Belushi, now himself a marijuana mogul, boasts a surprisingly auteurist pedigree couched within a sitcom-forward filmography, a high-and-low dichotomy he employs with precision as Kesey. He offers the film’s funniest and gentlest moments, stumbling joint-in-hand through workshop sessions and sitting placid as lake water when Lidia’s father appears unexpectedly at a reading. His Kesey is a veteran of war with the mystics, sage enough to know when advice can’t help.
Belushi’s disarming capacity for nuance also exposes The Chronology of Water’s occasionally loose grip on subtlety. Kesey proves himself an outlier. Lidia’s father lumbers with a venom that threatens to teeter into caricature, a lockjawed patriarch that might have found a welcome home in syndication with a few edits and a laugh track. The pen that underlines his menace is reflected in the film’s overall style, too. Cinematographer Corey C. Waters’ 16mm frames hug shoulders, fingertips, ankles, and elbows, often approximating Malick in miniature while in conversation with Lidia’s hyperliterate narration. But the assembly of that footage — stitched with sunbursts, flare-outs, simulated vinegar syndrome — too often recalls the VSCO filters that pummeled ersatz analog into ubiquity over a decade of gridposting.
It’s difficult, though, to hold aesthetic grievances too dearly in the shadow of Imogen Poots’ Lidia. The Chronology of Water finds the 28 Years Later actor at a career best, a muscled and searing performance that propels the swimmer-turned-writer over five chapters and two decades of a life shaped by trauma like the grooves of a riverbed. Even in recovery — a new life, a new partner, a new child — the tumult of abuse, the years of anesthetic compensation and raw-nerve hangovers, linger like a ghost under the floorboards. It’s as omnipresent as water: of the earth and air, of and into the body, lakes and pools in which to float or drown.
DIRECTOR: Kristen Stewart; CAST: Imogen Poots, Thora Birch, Jim Belushi, Tom Sturridge; DISTRIBUTOR: The Forge; IN THEATERS: December 5; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 8 min.
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