Director Ron Howard misses with uneven survival drama

If Eden were a book and not a film, it would be one of those massive historical tomes that your dad puts atop his Christmas list.

As a movie, the true story is still essentially a classic dad yarn, perhaps even director Ron Howard’s
“Roman Empire.” Howard loves true stories, and Eden, which premiered Saturday at the Toronto International Film Festival, is a particularly audacious entry in his filmography.

Dr. Friedrich Ritter (Jude Law) and partner Dora (Vanessa Kirby) pursue a utopian life of isolation on the uninhabited Floreana in the Galapagos Islands. Ritter’s mission is to escape the world and write his philosophical magnum opus, which he hopes will change society at its core. But when published accounts of his letters make him famous in Europe, he and Dora find their solitude disturbed. First, the Wittmers arrive — Heinz (Daniel Brühl), Margaret (Sydney Sweeney), and tubercular son Harry (Jonathan Tittel).

But despite Ritter’s attempts to scare them off by settling them in an inhospitable area, the Wittmers build a life for themselves that defies the odds. That is until Baroness Eloise and an excess of other names (Ana de Armas) and her lovers descend upon the island with an outlandish scheme to build a luxury hotel. From there, this hard-scrabble Eden, a place of tough but honest living, descends into a Lord of the Flies-esque carnival of manipulation, competition, and violence.

Howard, working from a script by Noah Pink, has a lot of plates to keep spinning, including the story’s wild swings between outrageous outbursts, sometimes played for laughs, and dog-eat-dog tension. Inevitably, with such an act, a few plates are bound to break.

Law goes balls out (literally) in crafting the narcissistic megalo­maniac that is Ritter, a man who deifies Nietzsche. The British actor continues his run of extreme character choices while still employing his leading man charms and swagger as the fiercest weapons in Ritter’s arsenal. Kirby goes toe-to-toe with him as Dora, a woman increasingly irritated by a dynamic where she does all the housework while her man pursues his art. She gives Dora a feral, hungry demeanor, crafting a portrait of a woman desperate for a miracle to take away her pain (Dora has MS, we learn). However, despite a strong showing from Kirby in the film’s first act, she is severely underused. Her subtleties are forced to play second fiddle to Law’s (enjoyable) scenery-chewing.

Brühl, who Howard endeared to American audiences in 2013’s Rush, is the steadiest, most dialed-in member of the cast. His Heinz is in noble pursuit of a better life, even if he must hold off the ghosts of his time as a World War I infantryman that lurk just behind his eyes.

Sweeney plays against type as a meek, dowdy wife fighting to find her voice. There are scenes where she hints at possibilities of something greater, most notably when she goes through labor while fending off a pack of wild dogs. But she has yet to give a complete performance that can convince me that she can be a great actress. The emotional weight and catharsis of the film rests on her slight shoulders, and it threatens to consume her.

By and large, her performance detracts from the quality of the film. Her German accent fails to pass muster (I’ve heard better in high school productions of Cabaret). More distractingly, it’s an unfortunate fact that Sweeney is not suited for a period piece. She has the energy of a modern woman, and it’s impossible to believe this is a human being who existed prior to the internet. It’s such a distinctive factor of her being that every time the camera is on her, it takes you out of the world and its storytelling.

De Armas also takes a big swing as the self-obsessed, dangerously confident Baroness. She prowls through every scene, attempting to use her faux grandeur and oozing sexuality to get her way. But we can tell in an instant that she’s a charlatan, and so can everyone on Floreana. Like her work in Blonde, De Armas substitutes overt sexuality for character study, hoping bravado can obscure her shortcomings. It’s over-the-top, and it’s unclear if the Baroness is just bad at seduction or if that’s a fault of the performance.

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly’s free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

Eden is an odd fit for Howard as a director. It has the historical credentials of his last decade-plus of films, with his pursuit of stories that are stranger than fiction (In the Heart of the Sea, Thirteen Lives, etc.). But it’s meaner and far more brutal than his usual fare. The film is beautifully directed, particularly in how it captures the stark beauty of nature largely untouched by man. But it lacks some of that feel-good, can-do spirit that has often made Howard’s work stand out amidst more pessimistic auteurs.

The story behind Eden is scintillating. I’d watch a documentary on it right now. And as a piece of narrative historical fiction, it has the potential to be fodder for a great thriller. Here, the end result is more of an erratic blend of survival drama, historical oddity, and petty domestic intrigue that boils down into a morass of standout moments dragged down by the film’s weaknesses as a whole. Grade: C+