Seen: April 11th, 2007
Format: DVD
Rating: 4
There are lots of ways to tell a story.You can tell it from multiple points of view that connect at one or more points in the film, or perhaps run parallel for larger portions of it. Then we've got the temporal displacement idea, whether obvious in the case of flashbacks or story within a story, or the ones where you're not quite sure what's happening when. Pulp Fiction did this to great effect, and an extreme case is Memento. Eventually these unique twists on story-telling become fashionable. And like all fashions, some attempts become disasters.
Haven is one of those disasters.
Haven attempts to harness both the multiple story angle, as well as the temporal displacement thing. To tell multiple stories well, they must either converge, with consequence, and/or carry a strong common theme. Crash and Traffic are two great examples. The stories must enhance and supplement one another. The whole becomes greater than the parts.
Haven attempts this and fails quite badly. There are two main stories here, with some sub-plots. The problem is that though some characters are common to both, they're not important to both, and the stories have entirely different themes. The first act concentrates on one story, and just when is starts to come together, the second act starts, focusing on the second story with no overlap. This confused me. At one point I actually thought the DVD was defective and when to the scenes menu to be sure that what I was seeing was correct.
I could have stood all this if some remarkable connection was made between the two stories that served them both. Act three was a simple parallel narrative, wherein both stories came to their individual conclusions, neither of which was particularly compelling.
The writer and director, Frank E. Flowers has been lauded for accurately portraying Caribbean island life, and in particular life in the Cayman Islands, with great truth and sincerity. This seems true to me and I applaud his effort. But he's given us two separate and distinct stories, badly mashed up using a fashionable technique into a single film. This serves neither story well. I'd rather have seen them presented as two shorts, each standing on its own merits.
Taken in pieces, Haven is not a complete disaster. There's some good writing here. Some good characterization and acting. There are beautiful observations and moments. There are some solid, though simple, themes. It's unfortunate that they're not well served by solid story telling.
Some defend this film, saying that those who don't appreciate it aren't intelligent enough to understand. For me, understanding it wasn't an issue, reconciling it was.
The Good: There's talent here
The Bad: The premises
The Ugly: The script
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