Parents' Guide to Adrift

Switching back and forth between a drippy romance before the storm and intense amounts of anguish and suffering after it, this based-on-a-true-story survival movie is overly reverent. Actors love movies like Adrift because they can use their most intense, high-velocity emotional ammunition; Oscar voters tend to love them, too, and awards frequently follow. Woodley, who also produced, first appears lithe and muscular, and then later, wasted and gaunt; she also uses makeup to make herself look sun-baked and destroyed. Her commitment is impressive, so it's too bad that her co-star, Claflin, is so lackluster and that the resulting movie is so glum and dispiriting.

Director Baltasar Kormakur fails to use the flashbacks or flash-forwards to find any resting ground for the story (which is set in the '80s); it thrums at a constant, wearying high pitch. The score's wailing string section doesn't help. Worse, the screenplay uses what could be easily described as a cheat, especially for a movie that wears its "true story" credentials on its sleeve (it ends with real-life footage). It feels as if it's so constrained with the effort of honoring the tale's real subjects -- whose actual story is indeed remarkable -- that it can't do anything but recycle the genre's clichés.