"Eden": Ron Howard Fails His Paradise Experience

After an inauspicious premiere at last year's Toronto Film Festival, and despite his long and prestigious career and solid reputation in Hollywood, Ron Howard was unable to find a distributor for his new film, Eden , and ultimately decided to finance its commercial release himself. Howard is a masterful and versatile storyteller, an Oscar winner, the author of many of the biggest box office and box office hits of recent decades, and one of the last representatives of the tradition of quality, entertaining industrial cinema in the United States, acclaimed by audiences and critics alike. The fact that Eden , an independent production, encountered such difficulties in its release speaks volumes about the state of affairs in the American film industry.

In a landscape dominated by superhero films with astronomical budgets and laden with digital effects, by blockbusters with giant bodies and atrophied heads, by franchises full of kicks and woke slapstick, Eden is a completely unmatched title, with its anachronistic quality, what used to be called a "thesis film," yet which simultaneously aims to be a spectacle. And what is Eden's thesis? That even in a (so-called) paradisiacal environment, civilizational values ​​can collapse and humanity can reveal its true (and very ugly) identity, despite its protests to the contrary.

[Watch the trailer for “Eden”:]

The film is based on real events that took place on an inhospitable island in the Galápagos archipelago called Floreana between the two world wars. These events were the subject of a 2014 documentary and were recounted in a book, with contradictory versions, by two of the people involved. Jude Law plays Friedrich Ritter, a German doctor turned philosopher, a pessimistic and bitter man who took refuge on that island with his disciple and lover, Dore Strauch (Vanessa Kirby), in the early 1930s to escape "fascism" and the political, economic, and moral bankruptcy of humanity, and to live frugally off the land and without modern comforts.

[See an interview with Ron Howard:]

In 1932, the Wittner family arrived, consisting of Heinz (Daniel Brühl), an idealist inspired by Ritter's writings, his wife, Margret (Sydney Sweeney), and a young son. Contrary to their expectations, they were met with hostility by Heinz and his mistress, who hoped the harsh living conditions on the island would quickly drive them away. But this did not happen, and the Wittners adapted well to Floreana and even managed to build a house. This precarious and spartan utopian micro-society was completed with the arrival of a would-be Austrian aristocrat, Baroness Eloise (Ana de Armas), accompanied by an engineer and a bodyguard, who claimed to be building a luxury hotel on the island.

Beautiful, insinuating, manipulative, and arrogant, the baroness is prone to abusing the patience and helpfulness of the other islanders (and, if necessary, stealing what little food they have stored). She quickly begins to get on their nerves, especially Dr. Ritter's, who is unable to write his book in peace and is increasingly bothered by the baroness's whims, abuse, vacuity, and arrogance, as she seeks to divide her neighbors and find allies among them—in this case, the Wittners. And if daily life on Floreana was already hard before she arrived, now it will become increasingly unbearable.

[Watch a conversation with the director and actors:]

Shot in Australia, Eden has some strengths, the first being its "anachronistic" personality, Ron Howard's intention to make people reflect while still entertaining, which sets it against the tide of current Hollywood filmmaking, and to this is added the superior quality and consistency of the cast. But it also has several problems, the biggest of which is its predictability (as soon as the baroness arrives on the island, we immediately guess that she will be the cause of the destruction of that fragile social experiment, and we see from a distance how and from which direction this will happen), followed by the demonstrable superficiality of the plot (the stereotype of man as a superior, failed animal, harmful to his fellow man, even though installed in a "paradise") and the characters.

[Watch a sequence from the film:]

Dr. Ritter is a demented backyard nihilist who writes sub-Nietzschean manifestos; his lover serves little more than a figurehead, the laborious Wittners provide the counterpoint of common sense and "normality," and Baroness Eloise is the typical bewitching and malevolent vamp (that long mouthpiece fools no one...), leaving little to do for the actors who inhabit them. Although Law strives to extract as much bile and intellectual and ethical contradiction as possible from his Dr. Ritter, and Ana de Armas tries to conceal the caricature that is the aristocrat. Only Sydney Sweeney impresses as Margret, the most sensible and resilient of the lot, who stars in a raw and brutal natural birth sequence without anesthesia or assistance, under the threat of a handful of wild and hungry dogs (Sweeney doesn't just have genes and jeans, she also has talent).

Reminiscent of many fictional and real-life narratives of survival, voluntary or involuntary, on distant, paradisiacal, or uninhabitable islands, and, timidly, of books like William Golding's "Lord of the Flies " (the genuine article) and its film versions, Eden is a unique and courageous film for its stance, which runs counter to current filmmaking trends and mainstream audience tastes. But it ultimately falls victim to narrative weaknesses and dramatic simplisticness. And it's a shame that this should happen to a director as capable, meritorious, and well-attuned to the concept of civilized entertainment as Ron Howard.