Limbo

It's a John Sayles film. If Lone Star or Passion Fish are on your list of great movies then Limbo will also have to be popped right up there near the top.

If you are a fan of Sam Shepherd (Paris Texas) then you'll have yet another reason to delve into Limbo. A good deal of the early dialogue, especially the longish monologues, have a pushy, erudite, raw, Shepherd feel to them. And both writer/directors feature characters who are dislocated, splintered away from the main focus of society.

Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in her best performance plays Donna De Angelo, a cabaret singer in her forties who has lobbed into an isolated town in Alaska called Juneau, getting what work she can. She's a supporting Mum, looking after her thirteen year old daughter Noelle (Vanessa Martinez from Lone Star).

Donna hasn't managed her men well. For whatever reason she has drifted through a number of relationships, often with musicians, but never with drummers in a great, friendly Sayles dig at skin pounders. We find her singing at an outdoor cocktail party with Noelle serving food for the caterer.

Noelle stands pouting as her mother yet again dumps her guitarist lover. She's seen it all before. Donna and local handyman Joe (Sayles stalwart David Strathairn) seem to be starting a romance.

But to a large extent plot is secondary in Limbo, as it should be if you think about it.

Limbo is a feast of personalities as they are confronted by their frontier environment and by their life stories.

It's an examination of the sorts of people who live in such places; environments where the disaffected and marginal can find a space to survive, and not necessarily thrive.

Joe has seen tragedy years before. He's walled himself away fairly comfortably in a harsh world where he can be sure that not much will be asked of him. David Straithern's wary, damaged confidence is fascinating.

Noelle is suffering from normal teenage angst but this has been augmented by her mother's insecurity and peregrinations. The daughter sports dialogue and circumstance that allows Sayles to delve deeply into the worries of the insecure.

Limbo is to a large extent her story, and all of our young life histrories, because John Sayles is a master at giving his audience perceptive half glances at complicated people and vital social processes.

The community is facing change. Logging, fishing and tourism are coming into conflict. The old ways are going. Alaska is becoming less of a frontier, joining civilisation.

But is it? The environment reaches out with icy, dangerous fingers and reminds these people how vulnerable they are. Limbo is a cogent, understated, plea for we humans to carefully manage the planet we live on.

A pair of argumentative lesbians, a sanguine indiginous cannery worker, a fisherman in a dingy with a pistol, a tourism entrepreneur and gaggles of tourists gawking at the locals slide in around and about within a script that is rich and full of irony.

And then there's the singer. Mary Elizabeth Mastantonio (The Abyss) gives a wonderful performance. John Sayles had the fish bones of a story and then found that Mastrantonio could sing, and so the story of Limbo developed.

This film gives a fine exposition on the art of singing, of how singing these songs (which I'm delighted to say includes Tom Wait's Heart Of Saturday Night) sometimes lifts itself beyond mundane performance into an important communication between the artist and audience.

Limbo is also very wryly funny. It will leave you thoughtful and exhilarated, with a greater appreciation of how rich in character we humans are.