The Island (Adam Weingrod, 2018): Israel

Three reasons the Island doesn’t work in a film festival.

1. Lacking narrative drive. In any story, we should start by getting some sense of what is normal in the world of the story. We meet our characters, and the world begins throwing conflict on them. In The Island, we don’t get a sense of normalcy, and there is no conflict. Weingrod tries to make the ever-present possibility of death be the conflict, and thus we never really move forward in the film.

2. Old people being old is not a story. In the Island, Adam Weingrod gets to be up close with men who cant take care of themselves. We do get a lot of graceful moments with them, but old men talking about what they wish they had done can only go on for so long. At some points, we see shots from a patio showing the contrast between the harsh outdoors and the peaceful inside, but in doing this, it misses the mark it had set up for itself. It makes the story ever more blurry by making the hospice itself a character.

3. Who am I supposed to be watching? The movie presents several individual threads. The man we see the most seems to have no reason to be in the movie until the very end. We see some of the people painting, but painting to eventually hang them up is not a strong enough narrative to drive the movie even when mixed in with the other storylines. The strongest storyline is about a man going to see his favorite Beethoven piece. If the movie was only this and cut down to 10 minutes it could have faired a lot better.