DIFF ’02: The Weight of Water

*½/****
starring Catherine McCormack, Sarah Polley, Sean Penn, Josh Lucas
screenplay by Alice Arlen and Christopher Kyle, based on the novel by Anita Shreve
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

by Walter Chaw Sort of a "Crucible" of period repression and sexual hysteria tied uncomfortably to Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon, Kathryn Bigelow's unreleased and maybe unreleasable The Weight of Water looks to parallel two distinct genres by mining the sexual tension in both. The problem with such a conceit is not its ambition–the picture's sort of admirable in a soggy, pretentious way–but rather the essential misunderstanding of the disparateness of the sources of that tension: the one stemming from a societal ban on sexuality (particularly of the homosexual kind), the other from being in love with a boorish philanderer who looks like Sean Penn. It's not difficult to see through the machinations of the piece, and the film is so desperate to be taken as gender allegory that, by its cacophonous conclusion, The Weight of Water is not so much a story as a badly-formed thesis the audience tries in vain to piece together in lieu of actual metaphoric coherence. Though the visuals impress, as they always seem to in Bigelow's work, the picture suffers from the kind of vague, unfocused narrative structure and characterization as the director's other films–sharing, too, a queasy unwatchability born of the story's inevitability and a general patina of distaste. Between Sarah Polley's tired shtick, Penn's ridiculous phoned-in pomposity, and Elizabeth Hurley's patented upper-lip-curl-as-acting, The Weight of Water is slicked-up jazzy lit-porn: all nice-looking people in various stages of excitement in the room coming and going and talking of Michelangelo.