In Ron Howard’s masterpiece Apollo 13, NASA flight director Gene Kranz (Ed Harris) stares down impossible odds and declares that “failure is not an option.” In Howard’s new film Eden, in theaters Aug. 22, the up-his-own-rear-end pioneer Dr. Friedrich Ritter (Jude Law) kvetches that “failure is inevitable.”
If Apollo 13 is a story about heroes, Eden is a story about losers and scoundrels—well, except for Sydney Sweeney’s character Margret Wittmer, based on a real person that we truly hope really did give birth alone on the floor of her shack while shoo-ing away barking wild dogs. But be honest: if you were on the settler-resistant Floreana Island (a chunk of volcanic rock in the Galápagos Archipelago) all your noble ideas about utopia and man’s ultimate purpose would likely crumble when your water sources dried up and/or meager crops were gobbled up by an errant boar.
Eden tells the dishy tale of what happens when a bunch of European idealists cross-polinate with opportunists in salty, sun-drenched air. The year is 1929 and Heinz Wittmer (Daniel Brühl), a WWI veteran with utopian dreams, is won over by PR tales of Dr. Ritter who, with his partner Dora (Vanessa Kirby), seem to have tamed a wild land with their bare hands and progressive philosophies.
When Wittmer, his wife (Sweeney), and sickly son arrive on Floreana, they find the facts on the ground are a little different from what they’ve seen on newsreels. Dora has not exactly conquered multiple sclerosis with the power of her mind, and Dr. Ritter’s manifesto, which is sure to solve all of humanity’s troubles, is proving itself difficult to get down on paper.
The Wittmers’ first months battling mosquitoes and searching for water are nothing compared to what’s coming next—an egomaniacal shyster calling herself the Baroness Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn, who stomps onto the island with dreams of building an exclusive hotel for millionaires. Ana de Armas, whose performance is a gift to future drag queens, chomps through her scenes deploying an inexplicable accent that owes more to Madeline Kahn’s Lily von Schtupp than any typical patrician baddie. She’s marvelous.
She’s got two boy toys with her, too, and they are soon deployed for her various schemes, which eventually backfire when Dr. Ritter finally blows his gasket. Writer’s block and a strict vegetarian diet will do that to you. What eventually follows isn’t too dissimilar from any number of island-based reality shows, only this one has Hollywood actors occasionally rambling about Nietzsche.
Sydney Sweeney (whose work in Reality proved that she actually can act) plays against type as a mild, wide-eyed, dutiful wife until, finally, her surroundings draw out the strength she never knew she had. Vanessa Kirby’s character arcs from manipulative meany to manipulative meany with a few extenuating circumstances. Daniel Brühl is a well-meaning dope who ought to seem familiar to anyone who has spent any time at a food co-op.
When Eden debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival last year it didn’t exactly set off fireworks. Ron Howard, an Oscar-winner with a slew of truly great films under his belt, has been on a bit of a weird run. First was Solo: A Star Wars Story, a movie so bland that Disney hit the snooze bar on further sidequels from that shared universe; then came Hillbilly Elegy, the weirdest Hollywood-produced political ad since John F. Kennedy approved Cliff Robertson’s casting in PT 109. (There was also Thirteen Lives, about the Thai kids that got trapped in a cave, that got buried on Amazon Prime.)
Eden is a bit of a bounce back for old Opie Cunningham. It has just enough of a literate air to seem intelligent, but primarily works as a series of escalating “oh no she didn’t!” scenes that build to a zany climax. Throw in shots of massive iguanas and scurrying equatorial crabs and you have a real movie on your hands.
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