By Dominique Paul Noth
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| Dakota Johnson and Olivia Coleman in 'The Lost Daughter' |
The Lost Daughter revels in a slowly unfolding character study, pursuing an interior understanding of how motherhood embodies mental danger and why interaction with young daughters can be particularly brutalizing and guilt-ridden.
The film meanders so much trying to make important points through naturalistic behavior that finally audiences have to wonder what the hell is the point? You start out not quite knowing where director Maggie Gylennhaal is going in her debut behind the lens after countless films in front of it. We recognize it is well crafted and thoughtfully naturalistic, but our efforts are not rewarded.
It’s a bit like The Power of the Dog also on Netflix and previously and favorably reviewed, but “Power” starts out with an interesting milieu of characters and tells its story step by clear step, rather than obfuscating the opening as the Gylennhaal film does.
“Daughter” focuses on a middle aged professor, Leda, played by Olivia Coleman, enjoying a working vacation on a Greek island, both drawn to and disturbed by a rowdy family of American tourists invading her space. Almost all is revealed or hidden by the looks among the participants.
Film patrons may feel misled early when a daughter of the tourists go missing, though we soon learn that it is her missing doll that holds the key to the plot.
Since “Daughter” features Coleman, an excellent actress frolicking with the likes of another excellent actor, Ed Harris, we remain a bit tolerant at the miniature pace of revelations. The more hypnotic and active understanding comes with a young version of the married Leda in flashbacks. An actress and singer worth remembering, Jackie Buckley, the best thing in the movie, emerges to fall into the tribulations, erotica and intellectual frustration that the middle-aged Coleman embodies.
As director, Gyllenhaal does nothing outrageous -- we almost wish she would. She relies so heavily on naturalistic behaviorism -- at which Coleman and Harris excel – that the viewer feels thwarted in getting under the skin of these characters. As an aside, we admire Dakota Jackson for proving she can take on a real acting role, again in the behaviorist mold.
I don’t want to discount the revelations about the self-destruction of intellectual and sensual control that motherhood entails. But though the film has changed the characters from Italians and devotees of Italian literature (substituting a world of tourism and comparative literature while staying faithful to the pseudonym-named popular author Elena Ferrante), it has kept a lot of the author’s asides and supposedly revelatory ramblings.
Only when the film explores in Buckley the younger behavior that has created such a mentally agitated but cryptic Coleman does the film and the editing provide some cinematic power. It’s a long wait for limited satisfaction, followed by a deliberately did-she or didn’t-she ending.
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About the author: Noth has been a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org. In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets. A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.
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