A smart, sophisticated, well-ordered romantic drama set mostly against the backdrop of well-off and carefree Brazil in the 1950s, director Bruno Barreto‘s Reaching for the Moon is built around an engagingly melancholic turn from Miranda Otto as real-life American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Yet this isn’t a typically showy awards-bait type of film; it benefits from its subject’s lesser known stature, as well as nicely interwoven ribbons of restraint and intelligence, which help cast a light on the less frequently discussed nature of restive ambivalence that can often be a part of the creative process.
Grappling with depression and writer’s block, Bishop (Otto) decides to leave New York City in the winter of 1951, and travel to Rio de Janeiro to visit an old American ex-pat college friend, Mary Morse (Tracy Middendorf). There, on the sprawling rural estate Mary shares with her bohemian partner of more than a decade, Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares (Glória Pires), Bishop settles in for a short stay, planning to head to other ports in South America after five days. Instead, an unlikely love affair with Lota blossoms, and the years slip away. Various obstacles — including Bishop’s ongoing fight with alcoholism, a national military coup and the awkward reintegration of Mary into their lives, along with her adoption of a baby with Lota — tatter and fray their relationship, but Bishop and Lota retain a bond that lasts well into the 1960s, before its tragic end.
Inspired by the nonfiction book Rare and Commonplace Flowers, by Carmen Lucia de Oliveira, Reaching for the Moon eschews a lot of the stodgy stumbling blocks that weigh down period piece dramas by simply refusing to be pinned down. Is this a Sapphic love triangle, a more straightforward biopic of Bishop, a South American political drama, or a bit of all three? Barreto and screenwriters Matthew Chapman, Julie Sayres and Carolina Kotscho find ways to illuminate Bishop’s stature (a phone call from Aldous Huxley after having received word of winning the Pulitzer Prize), but don’t get bogged down in hero worship. In fact, their movie is as much about the anxiety surrounding creativity as any actual works of art.
In this regard, the movie’s fairly conservative budget works to its advantage, ensuring a relatively compressed timeline and narrative focus. The film, Barreto’s nineteenth, is stately throughout, from Marcelo Zarvos’ quietly seductive score to cinematographer Mauro Pinheiro savvy touch with both lush landscapes and spatial relationships, the latter of which fluctuate to help illustrate at first burgeoning and then dwindling intimacy between characters.
If there are shortcomings, one is that Reaching for the Moon only faintly touches upon Bishop’s gifts as a writer. Additionally, Lota’s family friendship with rightwing politician Carlos Lacerda (Marcello Airoldi), integral to her selection for important design work on the capital city’s evocative Flamengo Park, is sketched out in functional strokes that don’t do full justice to Lota’s strong opinions. The former limitation is notably more of a sin of omission, and will bother viewers mostly according to their familiarity with Bishop and/or their desire for a more clearly centralized main character. The latter failing, however, renders certain third act sequences dry and pedantic.
Pires, in her first English language role, is adept at wielding Lota’s brassy directness as a weapon. Otto’s performance, meanwhile, is a delicate and superb thing — and especially heartening since so many films with an alcoholic protagonist cede the entirety of their personality to that disease. Here, Bishop’s reliance upon drinking (and, indeed, even drinking to excess) is shown, but she’s a functioning alcoholic, and seemingly drawn to booze as a self-medicating attempt to ameliorate her chances at avoiding a family history of mental illness — something which the movie intriguingly hints at, but could plumb to even deeper and more satisfying effect.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Reaching for the Moon comes to DVD presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English language closed captioning/SDHH. Alongside the movie’s theatrical trailer, the only other supplemental feature is a brief making-of featurette. The film’s marketing as an epic lesbian love story may relegate it to niche status, even within arthouse circles. That’s a bit of a shame, though, since Reaching for the Moon offers up a lot of other things upon which to reflect. To purchase the DVD via Half, click here; if Amazon is totally your thing, meanwhile, click here. B- (Movie) C+ (Disc)
