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" As I write this, it appears that the greatest democracy in the world has righted itself just in time to prevent serious global economic catastrophe. The threat may be over but shock at what almost happened will linger no doubt for years. Can anyone remember at any point in American history a situation in which such petty vanities have played with such immense stakes? Charles P. Pierce is right to call it the apotheosis of the reign of morons. America, and the world with it, has always stumbled from crisis to crisis, but this time it feels different. It feels suicidal. It feels nihilistic. It feels like the whole world is prey to forces that have spun out of control. Systems that have worked brilliantly for hundreds of years seem to be breaking down, and relatively suddenly. In the middle of this disintegration, with perfect timing, J.C. Chandor&amp;#039;s All Is Lost arrives in theaters this Friday. It&amp;#039;s one of those rare coincidences of pop culture and politics asking the same question: What do we do in the face of collapse? All Is Lost would be a remarkable film even if it didn&amp;#039;t fit the moment so perfectly. Much like Gravity, it creates a unique world that can&amp;#039;t really be experienced outside of a theater. Like Gravity as well, it is a film about human beings living in environments where they really shouldn&amp;#039;t be. Robert Redford plays a sailor whose ship hits a stray container in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The film follows his eight days of survival, first in the boat and then in a life raft. It&amp;#039;s a film essentially without character, without dialogue, and without side plots. After a brief, cryptic opening prologue, Redford&amp;#039;s character says almost nothing. We simply follow his actions in the boat and out of it. The oppression of the sea looms. Instead of dialogue and character, All Is Lost is an extended visual metaphor, which can be read any number of ways. It&amp;#039;s about death. It&amp;#039;s about decline. It&amp;#039;s about everything that falls apart and how incredible it is that we survive at all. Redford, having no voice, manages to communicate an immense range of emotions, moment by moment, as everything keeps falling apart: He moves from determination to anxiety to despair to pleasure at his own cleverness and back again. Most of all, Redford opens his character to a bold vulnerability. The character in All Is Lost seems really really old, which is something Americans do not see much of on film. They prefer their old people acting like dumb young people, like in Last Vegas. But old age takes a measure of guts that youth doesn&amp;#039;t. Redford in All Is Lost reminded me of an old lady who walks down my street in a walker, very very slowly, to the grocery store; that journey for her must be an odyssey, requiring courage and skill and cunning every single week. Robert Redford has had one of the longest and greatest careers in Hollywood. Even though he doesn&amp;#039;t speak here, or rather because he doesn&amp;#039;t speak, this is one of his finest performances. The visual metaphor of the boat falling apart is amazingly powerful, and also topical. It&amp;#039;s not just the elderly who can feel the world falling apart. It&amp;#039;s everybody. This week, in the UK, a major government report has decided to warn its citizens that children should expect to be worse off than their parents. Think about that: An entire nation, once a great nation, has decided that its plan for the future is managed decline. In America, sixty percent of the population wants a third party to enter politics. The old ways are so obviously collapsing. The recent economic crisis, and government shutdown, has led several commentators to question once-sacred principles, like the strength of the American Constitution as a guiding political document. The U.S. government was famously &amp;quot;designed by geniuses to be run by idiots,&amp;quot; and for over two hundred years that seems to have worked. But we&amp;#039;re discovering that there&amp;#039;s a major caveat to that famous formulation: The idiots have to believe in government in the first place. For the government to survive, the representatives have to want the government to survive. All Is Lost offers an answer to the question of how to deal with breakdown: Just keep going. Keep going with as much dignity and optimism as possible. At this point, such an answer may be a delusion, but it also may be a necessary one. This may be the week that we figured out that the systems aren&amp;#039;t working, but that doesn&amp;#039;t mean we know what to replace them with. PLUS: Read More Stephen Marche on The Culture Blog &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a25251/robert-redford-all-is-lost-shutdown/>