Hide Away

Hide Away

Joules Films, 2012

Directed by Chris Eyre

Starring: Josh Lucas, James Cromwell, Ayelet Zurer

One and a half stars (out of four) 

I really wanted to love Hide Away, and that's not just because it was filmed in my hometown and is graced, on so many frames, by the gorgeous expanses of Grand Traverse Bay. No, I wanted to love Hide Away because I loved the concept and because Josh Lucas is one of the most likable and underrated actors working today. At very least, Lucas's talent isn't in doubt, as he does a terrible amount of heavy lifting in a film that, ultimately, renders his efforts as both a thankless task and a moot point. When we land on the shores of the Grand Traverse Peninsula at the outset of the film, we are introduced to Lucas (as a character who is never explicitly given a name). He's come to the docks to buy a boat, and, rather inexplicably, he's wearing a suit. We don't need the screenplay to tell us that he's running away from something, but it throws us a few bones anyway. "Are you divorced?" asks the guy who sells him a frighteningly decrepit sailboat. "No, I'm not," Lucas replies. Apparently these docks are a haven for divorced men, running away from their pasts and trying to regain some vestige of youth and happiness. Neither of those options seem very likely for Lucas's character, who seems thoroughly grounded in his own personal darkness from the first frame to the last, but he's still here for the same reason: to disappear.

As the film progresses, the "Young Mariner" (so Lucas is named in the credits, if you get that far) sets about repairing the boat, often to comically disastrous results. He is observed by a pair of other damaged souls (a solid James Cromwell and an ambiguously accented Ayelet Zurer) who will offer him personal and technical assistance over the course of the story, and he even gets a few interested glances from the cute girl who works at the local grocery store (maybe they should have just made a movie of Springsteen's "Queen of the Supermarket" instead...) Amidst all of this, Lucas sinks into mourning and succumbs to an alcohol-fueled depression, rebuilding the broken-down boat as he tries to rebuild his own heart, soul, and life. It's a nice idea, as crushing loss has led to many great works of art in the past. Anyone who has ever lost a loved one will relate to our young mariner: when we lose the things that are most important to us, it feels impossibly wrong to move on without them, and Lucas plays that kind of unendurable pain very well. But the screenplay betrays his efforts, and clunky editing only makes matters worse. A long, drawn out montage during the film's mid-section shows Lucas's descent into alcoholism, but it feels more like an anti-drinking commercial than it does a movie. Even the nice moments in there, like one where he reads out loud to imaginary children, or where he loses his temper with another phantom in his head, have their emotional force truncated by tonally awkward fade-to-black cuts. The segment ends up feeling both painful and eternal, and the only solace comes from the fact that the film improves somewhat after it's over.

There isn't a whole lot of dialogue in Hide Away, and Lucas gets to spend a good deal of the (mercifully brief) runtime onscreen by himself. But even with so many intimate moments, we don't really get a deep sense of who he is. The same holds true for the supporting characters, who each have a few shining moments, but seem thrown in to fulfill decidedly more calculated plot points. Listed as the "Ancient Mariner" in the credits, we're (probably) meant to believe that Cromwell and Lucas are essentially the same person, with the latter being on a 20-year delay, but that slice of symbolism only gets a few moments of clarity. Zurer's character ("Waitress," how exciting) is even more of a caricature, with the film's most cringe-worthy moment coming when she solicits a sexual encounter with Lucas's character late in the film, eliciting a brief flashback that shows us just what happened to his family (and a too-subtle hint as to why he feels guilty enough to run away from it).



To Lucas's credit, he pulls this all off very well, giving us a handful of emotionally resonant moments in a film that otherwise never feels the slightest bit organic. The "plot twist" with his family doesn't work though, and it mutes the impact of his struggle with himself. The screenplay oscillates randomly between not giving it's audience enough credit and expecting them to make huge leaps in logic without the slightest bit of exposition or clarification, and the result is a frustrating, muddled mess of a movie that never finds its feet and has no damn clue what it wants to be. It would have been better to leave Lucas as an enigmatic figure, suffering from a nameless pain, to leave the funeral suit he arrives in at the film's outset as the only physical link to his mourning and his past life; it would have been better to build on the strong onscreen relationship he shares with Cromwell in their few scenes together and to pretty much eliminate Zurer from the film altogether; it would have been better if this film had a discernible story arc. Sadly, the film and it's director Chris Eyre (with whom I am entirely unfamiliar) don't take the ideal or sensible paths here, opting instead for something more minimalistic and abstract. But you can't have meaningful minimalism without a fully formed idea to build it on, and despite some nice flashes of concept, the framework here is distinctly half-baked.

Hide Away sounds good on paper: man loses family, runs away and starts re-building a boat in a symbolic nod to his own disrepair, helping a number of other people find their way in the meantime, and thus finding the redemption he came here looking for. Sadly, Eyre's film is able to find the emotional nuance in very little of that. More dialogue, more characterization, less heavy-handed editing, and more time would have helped the material breathe a little (though I can't say I wanted another 20 or 30 minutes when the credits finally rolled), but as is, Hide Away is a sloppy pile of ideas that never coalesce into anything more powerful than the sum of their parts (and actually distinctly less). Minor characters (and alcoholism) disappear without a trace, relationships spring up from nowhere, without any vestige of believability, and then the film just ends. There's no climactic moment, no real resolution, and certainly no memorable message to take away when the credits roll. Instead, it feels like Eyre just got tired of making this movie, and while I can hardly blame him, he does a major disservice to his characters (and to Josh Lucas, in general) by never giving them the time to grow. Worse, he does a poor, shallow job of depicting a theme and struggle that should have been intrinsically devastating and viscerally moving; I just wish someone had told him.