Eureka
Directed by Lisandro Alonso
Written by Lisandro Alonso, Martin Caamaño, Fabian Casas
Starring Viggo Mortensen, Chiara Mastroianni, Alaina Clifford, Sadie LaPointe
Runtime: 147 minutes
In theaters September 20, streaming on November 22

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

Argentine writer/director Lisandro Alonso has told wildly varied stories in his career; sharing promotional stills from his last three films is probably the best way to express just how varied:

That's an American Western, a more personal story about the separate lives of two sisters on a reservation in South Dakota in the present day and an ensemble in 1970s Brazil. And I'm lying-- all three shots are from Alonso's most recent film, Eureka. As much ground as the story covers, it's essentially a pocket film festival with one set of end credits. It's hard to believe these segments are all part of one narrative until you actually watch the film, and then it makes perfect sense.

Eureka's disparate parts end up being so cohesive that they are, paradoxically, difficult to talk about. You could read a straight summary of the film and everything would make sense, but so much of the joy of the film is found in watching things unfold and discovering just how these ideas fade into each other. Everything opens in black and white, framed in boxy Academy ratio with curved corners. A Native American man sings on a mountaintop and Viggo Mortensen hitches a ride on the back of a nun's hearse. Arriving in a desert town, he hears gunshots in the distance, but nobody seems bothered by them.

Alonso uses Mortensen's charm in the same way David Cronenberg did in A History of Violence. I was warm enough toward the Mortensen character that it was especially shocking when his character shot a half-sleeping man for the sin of muttering "Go away." Maybe I just like Viggo. Maybe it's a me thing. The western segment appears to be a riff on The Searchers, and when Eureka transitions from it to the next of its three segments, it'll surprise you. We never return to Mortensen's character, with his incredible aim and pistol that never needs reloading. I missed that segment's gorgeous black-and-white photography and its eerie silence (I liked the segment a lot more than I've ever liked The Searchers), but the transition out of its world is brilliant enough that I can't mourn its presence in Eureka too much.

The Western is also, notably, complete enough to be a "segment" and not just a passing scene. Movies employ action scene fake-outs all the time and it's so cheap. They'll show us an action bit and then a director character will yell "cut" and we'll take a step back and realize the actors are all playing actors who are playing action stars. It's meta-wankery, a trick that lets the filmmakers indulge in a little fun before descending into their film's actual plot. Often, you're just left wishing you were watching more of the action you were initially promised. But this is something else: a short film in full conversation with everything that follows. It isn't a feint, it's part of the text.

From the western, we get more personal, ending up in South Dakota, in the middle of a brutal cold snap. It's the present day, on a reservation. The aspect ratio has become wider and the curved corners are gone. Officer Alaina Debonna (Alaina Clifford), a woman on the Oglala Sioux tribal police force, suits up, leaves home and heads into the weather a TV news report has just cautioned everybody else about. Her younger sister, Sadie (Sadie Lapointe) lingers a minute and then leaves home as well.

Driving through the snow, Alaina finds Maya (Chiara Mastroianni), a white French actor, broken down on the side of the road. Bringing her to safety and warmth at the local high school, Alaina leaves the actor with Sadie. Maya's doing research for a Western she's set to star in and as they wait for the mechanic Sadie's called to fix Maya's car, she starts prying into Sadie's life with the kind of sympathy that never threatens to become empathy.

"Coach many kids here? Must be hard," Maya says. "Just like everywhere else," Sadie says.

"I've heard there's a surge of youth suicides. You work here-- do you know anything about it?" Maya asks. Sadie shifts a little and says "Are you sure you're an actress, or are you one of those reporters here to give us bad press?"

A lot of the time, when people talk about "good dialogue," they mean clever, flashy. I like that kind of writing a lot. But the terse, plain writing in this moment is just as impressive. You can sense that maybe Maya saw her rescue as a blessing more because it embedded her further into a community she thinks of as tragic than because it stopped her from freezing to death. It gave her something to put into a future performance. And Sadie is written at the top of her intelligence, not falling for a chance to become part of somebody's trauma porn. Even as Sadie pushes back, as the conversation levels out a bit, Maya's still probing. She's just a little more subtle about it. There isn't any shame in her questions, but she has to lighten up to keep Sadie from shutting her down again.

The day after I watched Eureka, I spent some time reading real-world material about why Alaina's car reads "Oglala Sioux" but the tribe is known as the "Oglala Lakota" Nation. It's a complicated issue. Alonso and his co-writers did their research. After watching Maya's scenes, I felt comfortable assuming they did it the right way.

Alaina goes to other places in the night. It's all very realistic, humanly acted stuff. Most of her story's big beats play out in real-time. The film will cut around her driving, but once she's engaging somebody-- a drunk driver, an irate woman with a knife, a casino worker who thinks something bad's happening in one of his hotel's rooms-- everything slows down to an intense crawl. Eureka is the only film on Alaina Clifford's IMDb page, which makes her control of her scenes that much more impressive. Her winces, her sighs, her silences are so "lived-in," as cliche as that sounds. She moves like she's comfortable with herself and everybody else, like she doesn't have to hurry through anything. She moves the way a working person does when they're simultaneously dealing with heavy shit and trying to run the clock out.

That hotel room in the casino ends up being totally empty. A window is broken and we're told the room stinks, but the sequence, which we've been prepped to worry about (there was yelling and pistol fire before Alaina showed up), culminates in some long, resigned stares into the snow outside. Philip Seymour Hoffman once said you could tell an experienced actor from an amateur by their stillness, and Alaina Clifford's job here is largely to communicate stillness, at least externally. It would be a much easier job if Clifford was given more dialogue to fill the silences or if the camera swirled around her instead of locking in for long, static takes. If other filmmakers don't see this and hire her, we'll be living in a worse world than I had thought.

Sadie Lapointe, also here as a first-time feature actor, endures her own slow night, visiting an incarcerated friend and doing things that would sound boring if I wrote them out here (i.e. sitting on a bench outside a police dispatcher's office, waiting) but are gripping for her subtle performance and Alonso's ability to communicate how people feel when they aren't telling you. When she eventually voices her internal life to her grandfather, you're already aware of how torn up she is inside, which is not to say that her emotional outpouring feels redundant.

It's striking to realize Alonso's stuck an international superstar in Eureka's first scenes and then given a platform to people who are just as good but don't have previous film credits. A half-dozen industries have sold merchandise with Viggo Mortensen's face on it in most countries in the world, and to use him, both because he's a brilliant actor and because he's a familiar face, as a lead-in to somebody else's story is a sort of generosity. This is how you get Alaina Clifford and Sadie Lapointe to star in a movie. You put them in a bait-and-switch with a guy everybody likes and who lacks the ego that would keep him from playing support to them. It's also (and this is true of Chiara Mastroianni's character's role in Eureka) a smart inversion of the way people of color are so often used in bad art. Usually, an indigenous person would show up to teach the white leads about themselves or underline a theme. Here, the white actors do that for the indigenous ones. Mastroianni's Maya comes to town to take some experiences from Sadie's life, but gets left behind in a high school gym. She clarifies some feelings Sadie's already had and then we never see her again.

I guess you could call Eureka a revisionist western, with its cowboys and Indians opening and the subsequent Indians and Indians chapter, but "revisionist western" is too limiting a tag for a piece of art that attempts to revise much more than a film genre with an already-diminished place in pop culture. This becomes much clearer in the film's third chapter, which is, ironically, its most elliptical. Alsono and his cinematographers, Timo Salminen and Mauro Herce (I am not sure which of the two credited Directors of Photography shot which portions of the film) give Eureka's final segment a wider aspect ratio than the first piece but a more narrow one than the second piece. The corners are rounded again. I have my own theories about the shifting presentation, but, again, the way the film lays them out is its own pleasure. I can't spoil that here.

I can't talk about the third segment much without spoiling the turns the film makes or how its parts form a whole. I'm not going to pretend to understand why we jump from South Dakota to a Brazilian jungle fifty years in the past, following a different tribe of colonized people, but I'm also not going to theorize about it and risk blowing some of the magic. But the things you realize-- like, say, the difference in the way violence is handled between this segment and the Western-- give you plenty of chew on. Little bits of conversation will illuminate recurring themes of people trying to leave the spot they're in, and then you'll realize the Western segment was about a person traveling into a spot to be left, whereas the South Dakota and Brazil segments are about wanting to leave the place you've always been, and then you'll realize you're viewing the same idea from different angles, and you'll connect that to which non-English dialogue was subtitled and which wasn't and so on. There's so much here.

I haven't mentioned the bird. I'm not going to mention much about the bird or its flight to the Crazy Horse memorial. The revelation there is too beautiful and sad. I can't blow Eureka for whoever's reading this and then expect them to have the same "eureka" moments with it that I did. Some things you need to sit with.

The film is often about the limits of time, anyway. In the final scene of the Eureka's second part, one character asks another if they'll meet again in the future. "You must remember," the person she's talking with says, "space, not time. Time is invented by man. It's fiction." And you can apply that to the movie on its face, or you can use it as a lens through which to view the parts of the movie's story that are explicitly about fiction. It's too simple to hand people things to think about. You can just throw a bunch of images at me, tell me they're somehow connected and I'll mentally roll them around for at least a few minutes. It's much harder to do what Eureka does with all of those quiet, slow scenes I've mentioned. Only the best writers, directors, actors, art departments and so on can give you this much to think about after keeping everything so focused. But "focused" and "limited" are not synonyms. There are several ouvres' worth of ideas in Eureka.