The Weight of Water

I was driven back to The Weight of Water by the Hurt Locker, simply because, different as they are, they had the same director. I am as guilty as Rich in his exchange with Adaline when he expresses doubt that a woman would be capable of choosing an axe for a murder weapon. She responds with Lizzie Borden, and he responds that she was acquitted, and she responds yes, by a jury of men who could not conceive of a woman wielding an axe. I was first surprised that a woman had directed Hurt Locker, and then doubly surprised that she had also directed The Weight of Water, a film I had already seen three times. I went back for a fourth time.

This conversation between Rich, playing the brother of Thomas (Sean Penn), is light fare compared to the one between Adaline (played by Elizabeth Hurley) and Jean (Catherine McCormack), wife of the Sean Penn character. It is presumably about poetry (Thomas is a poet), but both women know it goes much deeper.

Early in the film, Thomas makes this comment: “Women’s motives are always more concealed.” I suppose those words could set off a raging debate, which I would not mind staging here if anyone has read this far.

This movie interleaves two stories better than any other I can remember. Jean is a photographer commissioned by a magazine to take pictures of the scene of an unsolved crime that took place more than a hundred years ago. Like many journalistic types in many movies she involves too much of herself in the reporting, and the juxtaposition of the past and her present simultaneously illuminate and destroy each other.

There is only one word for how the action reveals the truth – visceral.