Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Ron Howard
Starring: Jude Law, Ana de Armas, Vanessa Kirby, Daniel Brühl, Sydney Sweeney
There's nothing worse than jetting off to some far flung destination to get away from it all, only to find yourself stuck with fellow travellers from your own country. Spare a thought for Friedrich Ritter and Dore Strauch, who left 1929 Germany and its growing fascist society to build a new life on Floreana, a remote and uninhabited island off the coast of Ecuador. After an initial period of isolated bliss, Friedrich and Dore were horrified to find the island becoming increasingly crowded as they were joined by a German family and a self-described European Baroness with two of her lovers in tow.
Ron Howard's Eden dramatises the events that followed. It's a campy romp filled with comedy German accents and hammy performances, and eventually guns are brandished and knives are drawn. But it's never as entertaining as all that suggests, and after its sluggish two-plus hours you may well come away wishing you could have seen a version of this story from a Germanic filmmaker like Haneke, Herzog or Seidl rather than a Hollywood journeyman.
Jude Law and Vanessa Kirby play Friedrich and Dore. Friedrich is a would be philosopher, which was the early twentieth century's version of the sort of bloke who always ruins a party by producing bongos. He believes he's writing a book that will change the world, but the extracts we hear are like something penned by a 15-year-old who just discovered Morrissey. Dore suffers from MS, and has fallen for Friedrich's quack remedy, which suspiciously involves a lot of tantric sex.
You wouldn't want to be stuck at a wedding table with Friedrich and Dore, but they seem to fit together so good luck to them. Less secure in their relationship are Heinz (Daniel Brühl - what must he have thought of his co-stars' accents?) and his younger wife Margaret (Sydney Sweeney), who arrive on the island with their young son Harry (Jonathan Tittel) and a second child on the way. A survivor of the horrors of the Great War, Heinz hopes to build a peaceful new life but his wife doesn't seem too keen on raising a family in such an uncivilised setting.
After some initial tension, the Wittmers learn to keep their distance from Friedrich and Dore, and the two groups co-exist by generally avoiding each other. Further disruption arrives in the form of a swinging socialite who calls herself Baroness Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn (Ana de Armas), accompanied by her lover Rudolph (Felix Kammerer) and her "bodyguard" Robert (Toby Wallace), who also happens to be her lover. With grand plans to open a hotel on the island, Eloise immediately rubs the previous settlers the wrong way, as does her nasty habit of stealing their food.
The stage is set for what should be a gripping drama about a bunch of Euro trash getting under each other's skin, and there is some campy fun to be had. Most of that comes from de Armas, who does her best to keep us awake with a big and brash performance while the rest of the cast sleepwalks through this misery fest. But though this is based on real events, the scenario rarely feels plausible, as Howard and screenwriter Noah Pink fail to humanise their characters.
Everyone here is a broad caricature - the vampy villainess, the pretentious philosopher, the shrewish young wife etc - and we never really get to know anything about them beyond such superficial depictions. Most of what we learn about these characters comes from others speaking behind their backs, as Howard and Pink seem incapable of letting them speak for themselves. We're told a lot about these people but shown little to back it up. Much is said of Heinz's PTSD for example, but we never actually see its effect.
While the actors are solely to blame for their terrible accents, you get the sense that the cast is struggling to figure out their characters because neither the script nor the director understands these people. I've long felt that Howard is a script-reliant director - i.e. give him a good script and he'll deliver a good movie, but he'll never elevate a bad script - and Eden is a striking confirmation of such suspicions.
Eden is on Prime Video from October 24th.
