Restless is a wonderful, sweet, playful, sad tale of young love, death, ghosts, and transformation. Hovering over all, are questions of the afterlife. The message of this film is—by having the courage to commit to the “present” and say what one means, the “after” becomes irrelevant. It’s a cliché by now, but that’s the reason “present” and “gift” are synonymous.
Enoch Brae (played by Henry Hopper, making his acting debut and looking hauntingly like real-life father Dennis) is an eccentric youth, saddled with the morbid proclivity of gate-crashing other folks’ funerals. Enoch’s parents died in a violent car crash, which has caused him to come a little unglued, seeking answers in the faces of strange corpses.
Enoch died as well, clinically, for a short while, in the crash. He maintains later, in a distraught moment, that there was nothing, and that there IS nothing, in the afterlife.
However, he fails to enlighten to the glaring fact that it was only after he was dead for a few minutes that he started seeing and communicating with his best friend—the ghost of a Japanese kamikaze pilot named “Hiroshi” (Ryo Kase)—and thereby not seeing the forest for the trees, in terms of the existence of an afterlife.
Enoch’s furtive funeral-focus is eventually busted by an observant, likeminded young woman who ignores his rebuffs and wins his trust. It turns out that the curious, nature-loving Annabel (played by the latest Australian acting-force-to-be-reckoned-with, Mia Wasikowska) is dying.
Knowing her broken wing is beyond fixing, Enoch is drawn to accompany her on her final journey, and on that journey they fall in love. They are a special couple—two little oddball birds of a feather.
The costuming was inspired, dressing them with touches of vintage 1920s and 1930s fashion, reflecting a shared wisdom, beyond their years, gained through painful early losses.
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There are notes of “The Bucket List” (naturally) and “Harold and Maude” here, as well as Ferris Bueller’s endless curiosity about life and the need to look under every stone, with humor. They take the time to memorize the names of water birds and bugs, write and rehearse death scenes, and so on.
One immediately senses a young woman’s touch on this film, a la Sofia Coppola. That’s probably because it’s the producing debut of actress Bryce Dallas Howard, guided by her superstar “triple-threat” father, Ron.
As the film’s most poignant line states, “We have so little time to say any of the things we mean. We have so little time for any of it.”
Although the pace is sometimes a bit slow, Restless shows us two doomed young lovebirds appreciating the gift of each other, and taking the time to more fully express the things they mean. Van Sant’s silent takes are a further, perfect example of that.
[etRating value=“ 3.5”]
