Main Cast: Catherine McCormack, Sarah Polley, Sean Penn, Josh Lucas, Elizabeth Hurley
Release Year: 2000
Country: US
Run Time: 113 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
A woman studying a crime of the past finds her own life becoming a morass of suspicion and deceit in this drama based on the novel by Anita Shreve. Jean Janes (Catherine McCormack) is a photographer working on a project that would document surviving evidence of a multiple murder that occurred a hundred years ago -- when a man named Louis Wagner (Ciaran Hinds) brutally killed two immigrant women from Norway with an axe, only to discover a third, Maren Hontvedt (Sarah Polley), witnessed the mayhem and survived to identify him in court. Jean travels to the small New Hampshire coastal town where the killings occurred with her husband Thomas (Sean Penn), an award-winning poet; his brother Rich (Josh Lucas); and Rich's girlfriend Adaline (Elizabeth Hurley). As Jean digs deeper into the troubling facts of the long-ago murder, as well as the tangential details of Maren Honvedt's unhappy marriage to John Hontvedt (Ulrich Thomsen) and her incestuous affair with her brother Evan (Anders W. Berthelsen), Jean begins to believe that she has a crisis of her own to contend with: she is convinced Thomas is having an affair with Adaline. The Weight of Water also features Katrin Cartlidge as Maren's sister Karen and Vinessa Shaw as her sister-in-law Anethe. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Review
Shelved for nearly two years after its premiere at the 2000 Toronto Film Festival, Kathryn Bigelow's adaptation of Anita Shreve's bestseller is indeed everything its detractors said it was: decadent, pretentious, and indulgent -- but in the best possible way. With its languid pace, natural-splendor backdrop, and supermodel cast, The Weight of Water recalls the sumptuous, ennui-laden films of Michelangelo Antonioni -- or, more specifically, the tony knock-offs that populated European cinema for most of the 1970s. What Bigelow manages to do with the material, however, is to drain it of the artificial "significance" that other filmmakers might have assigned it, whether through dumbed-down editing or clearly telegraphed dialogue. As it stands, The Weight of Water's parallel story lines remain just that; they never intersect in an obvious way. Themes of sex, death, and regret pop up in each time period, but the frissons between the troubled, taciturn women of the past and the licentious, self-obsessed characters of the present are never made completely apparent. Rather than feeling inconsequential, however, Weight is, well, weightier for what it doesn't spell out about the radically different sexual politics of the two eras, and about the unique psychological baggage prevalent in both. ~ Michael Hastings, All Movie Guide
Mali Finn - Casting, Christopher Zimmer - Co-producer, Marit Allen - Costume Designer, David J.Webb - First Assistant Director, Kathryn Bigelow - Director, Howard E. Smith - Editor, Steven Charles Jaffe - Executive Producer, Lisa Henson - Executive Producer, David Hirschfelder - Composer (Music Score), Karl Juliusson - Production Designer, Adrian Biddle - Cinematographer, A. Kitman Ho - Producer, Sigurjon Sighvatsson - Producer, Janet Yang - Producer, Mike Smith - Sound Mixer, Tod A. Maitland - Sound/Sound Designer, Dennis L. Maitland - Sound/Sound Designer, Alice Arlen - Screenwriter, Anita Shreve - Book Author
A newspaper photographer, Jean, travels to the Isles of Shoals with her husband (Thomas), his brother (Rich), and Rich's girlfriend to research the real-life murder of two women in 1873. In a twist of fate, Jean discovers archived papers that appear to give an account of the murders by the lone survivor, a Norwegian immigrant named Maren. The plot weaves between the narrative of these papers and Jean's private struggle with jealousy and suspicion as she suspects her husband of infidelity.
