Ron Howard has always taken pride in being an eclectic filmmaker — in the last 40 years, he has made movies about mermaids, cocoons, auto factories, astronauts, firefighters, newspapers, beautiful minds, cave rescuers, the Grinch, the Da Vinci Code, the Beatles, and Pavarotti. But at the Toronto Film Festival premiere of his latest movie, “ Eden ,” he declared that the film stands farther apart from his other work than anything he has ever done. He’s right, though not for the reasons he thinks.
“Eden,” which is based on events that unfolded 100 years ago on one of the Galápagós Islands, is a difficult movie to characterize. It’s been labeled as a “thriller,” but I would describe it more as a misanthropic survivalist “Robinson Crusoe” meets “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” with deranged footnotes by Friedrich Nietzsche. For Howard, the film sure is different (it has sex, murder, and animal slaughter).
Yet there’s another word for it — the word is terrible. While there’s no denying that Howard has made the ultimate movie not in his wheelhouse, what’s most different about it isn’t the eccentric subject matter. It’s that Howard got so immersed in the subject, so possessed by it, so lost in it that he forgot to do what he can usually do in his sleep: tell a relatable story.
From the outset, we’re nagged by the question: If the characters are historically based and “real,” then why do they feel so hopped-up and synthetic? Jude Law .