As is reported in Variety, writer-director Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine and, most recently, The Place Beyond the Pines) is being locked into a fourth title (lest we all forget Brother Tied), which will see him adapt M.L. Stedman‘s The Light Between Oceans. While getting these things together ought to be a nice-enough turn of events for any helmer, it might be a truly significant occasion for the man at hand: having finally secured himself a bit of Hollywood coin, the title is coming with full support of DreamWorks and David Heyman‘s Heyday Films.
Not that it gives the impressions of a commercial venture one might otherwise anticipate from these two entities. Based on what’s stated, tackling The Light Between Oceans will allow Cianfrance to continue playing with those dark-tinged relationship dynamics that had significantly defined his 2010 and 2013 releases, moral judgements (and all related values) naturally, expectedly included. You want lonely men? You want a complicated father-child dynamic? It’s here, and, after the impressive ambition of The Place Beyond the Pines — a movie that, no matter some of its clearer flaws, rarely lost sight of a larger, more strangely metaphorical picture — we’re looking forward to how this snaps in place.
Here’s a plot rundown, courtesy of Amazon:
“After four harrowing years on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia and takes a job as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, nearly half a day’s journey from the coast. To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes once a season, Tom brings a young, bold, and loving wife, Isabel. Years later, after two miscarriages and one stillbirth, the grieving Isabel hears a baby’s cries on the wind. A boat has washed up onshore carrying a dead man and a living baby.
Tom, who keeps meticulous records and whose moral principles have withstood a horrific war, wants to report the man and infant immediately. But Isabel insists the baby is a ‘gift from God,’ and against Tom’s judgment, they claim her as their own and name her Lucy. When she is two, Tom and Isabel return to the mainland and are reminded that there are other people in the world. Their choice has devastated one of them.”
Going off the information made available, does Oceans sound like a proper fit for Cianfrance?