Sunday, July 8, 2018

SALT AND FIRE (2017) **


Michael Shannon stars as the CEO of a high-profile company responsible for a catastrophic ecological disaster.  Veronica Ferres is an ecologist sent to access the damage.  Since Shannon is clearly nuts, he kidnaps her and a series of mind games between the two escalate.

Ferres’ plan is to get Shannon talking.  The thought is, the more he talks the more he'll let his guard down.  Fortunately for the audience, he talks a lot.  Shannon has a way with writer/director Werner Herzog’s dialogue.  He nicely captures the quizzical nature and eccentric rhythms of Herzog’s speech while very much keeping the character uniquely Shannon.  Whether he’s talking about broken down trains or pontificating on parrots, he really keeps your attention with his offbeat performance.

If only the narrative wasn’t so frustrating.  The first half in which Ferres is taken hostage is much stronger than the second.  It’s here where she is forced to play mother hen to a duo of blind boys and help them make their way through a seemingly endless salt flat.  Sure, this sequence is filled with some glorious looking cinematic compositions, but it also happens to be extremely heavy-handed, contrived, and ultimately boring.

In fact, the whole thing more or less falls apart once Shannon disappears.  Without his oddball charisma, Salt and Fire fails to generate much interest.  Ferres does what she can, but she just isn’t engaging enough to make the Shannon-less passages work.  You know you’re in trouble when her most memorable scene comes from waiting for her luggage at the airport.

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