"Into a limbo large and broad, since called The Paradise of Fools, to few unknown." – John Milton This is one of John Sayles' best film. All the usual John Sayles flaws are here – a rather plain aesthetic, shallow socialism, dated radicalism etc – but these should be overlooked. The actual narrative structure of the film is genius.Sayles opens on a school of fish, closely packed and teetering on the brink of suffocation. Later we will see them flopping about, dying on dry land. Their plight is mirrored to the inhabitants of small town Alaska, who face job cuts, the effects of mechanization and the encroachment of big tourist and logging companies. Like the fish, everyone here is slowly going extinct, their natural environment changing. This leads to several characters "evolving" different means of survival. These means of survival will get more desperate and violent as the film progresses, characters switching jobs, turning to trafficking drugs, murder etc. In other words, everyone in "Limbo" is caught in some form of limbo, Sayles documenting the lengths people will go in order to break free of their uncertainty (and to inject some modicum of hopefulness into the circumstances they find themselves).The film focuses on three characters: an ex fisherman, a club singer called Donna, and her daughter. "Suffocation" or "drowning" motifs orbit around each of them. For example, the ex fisherman lost his friends/family in a drowning accident, an event which put his own life in stasis. Likewise, not only is Donna's own career in limbo, the woman teetering between unemployment and stardom, but the status of her romantic life is always intermediate, the film opening with her being dumped by yet another boyfriend.As the film progresses, Donna and the fisherman will strike up a relationship, each rescuing the other from limbo. But this relationship, and their very survival, will then be swiftly called into question, as they're eventually marooned on an island. Throughout the film, individuals, corporations, couples, loners etc are all pushed onto a kind of precipice of uncertainty, always trapped between rescue/survival and death/extinction.The film's first half is radically different from its second half. In the first half, Sayles uses a multi-threaded narrative in which we're bombarded with information and characters. This is Altman territory, Sayles forcing us to tease out fragments of plot, the director relishing our confusion. We have no idea who our lead characters are, or what indeed the film is about.Nevertheless, important information is being conveyed here. A narrator welcomes us to "America's last frontier" and praises the country's natural wonders, but Sayles' ironic imagery conveys the opposite, treating us to images of Alaska's eradication, men in tacky animal suits, tourists lining up for tickets, and a barrage of inauthentic, cheap, tourist goods. Alaska's "real" nature is being bulldozed, and with it all "authentic experience".As tourists descend upon Alaska, Sayles links them to dying salmon caught in nets and later dead fish hurling along conveyor belts. While this is going on, businessmen in charge of logging companies and tourist boards discuss things. "We want to develop themes here," one says, speaking of his desire to set up little tourist theme parks. As he talks, assistants and servants dance about, tending to his every need. But these businessmen will be swiftly discarded in favour for "the real Alaskan experience", Sayles focusing on a group of characters marginalised by gender, sexuality, race, age, economics etc. These characters, most of whom are disadvantaged, use a variety of different tactics to subvert or use to their own benefits the discourses at work around them. Their "little battles" are then morphed into the plight of three characters, the fisherman, Donna and her daughter, who find themselves stranded on an island. Existing off the tourist footpaths, this is the real "Alaska experience" ("People pay money to go on trips like this!"), the trio fighting off both wild nature and human competition.The island the trio find themselves on is called "Kuleshov Island". We recall Russian film theorist Lev Kuleshov's "Kuleshov effect", in which an audience is allowed to imbue "blank" images with their own "story", "emotions" and "effects". Kuleshov himself made a film, very similar to "Limbo", titled "By The Law", in which a group are stranded in Alaska and share a cabin in the wilderness. What Sayles does is use the "Kuleshov effect" to position the audience such that we resolve the film's story. Will our trio be rescued, or will they be sold out by a character called Smiling Jack (his name is itself suggestive of either benevolence or fiendish scheming - we choose)? Mirrored to this uncertainty is the film's embedded narrative. Here, Donna's daughter finds the diaries of a little girl who herself died on Kuleshov Island. This story-within-a-story is narrated by Donna's daughter who, when she reaches the diaries incomplete end, completes the story herself by imagining/constructing the rest of the plot. In other words, she completes the girl's fate as we complete the fate of the current Kuleshov trio.So what we have is an ensemble (society) which is bulldozed to make way for the "modern experience", a simulacrum of a dying "reality". This abstraction is reversed by a fable-like story in which a small fragment or representation of society fight for survival on an island. Here, a trio symbolically battle over their fate (the fisherman's a dour realist, Donna's a blind optimist and the daughter is an artist/dreamer). Kuleshov style, their fate is then left up to us. This, of course, like Sayles other "implicative narrative" ("Passion Fish"), directly implicates us in their plight, and enfolds us into the film. We, and cinema, are a part of the problem and a part of the solution.8.5/10 – Sayles trades literal sermonizing for something more abstract. Ignore the film's many flaws. What Sayles is doing here is very rare. Worth two viewings.

A strange little film about the frontier that has always fascinated Americans: the sea, nature, the winter, and many other things that come along when you are isolated and lost in the big vast chasm this natural wilderness may look like along the coast of the state of Washington. To give come depth to the story, the film builds on the characters. A mother, singer by profession, drifter by family life, and her daughter, lost and unstructured by that life of no stability since any man has to be abandoned as fast as possible. Then the film throws in her/their legs a divorced middle aged man who was a fisherman but isn't anymore, who would like to have a peaceful life but cannot avoid being dragged into some shadowy and shady business by a half brother of his. Then the rest is details. The scenery is beautiful though not overused. The weather is chilly and we can feel it perfectly well. The anxiety, the fear, the panic now and then are perfectly present and lively. The daughter what's more is fantasizing some kind of diary left behind by some previous runaway abandoned escapee of some sort. The film though tries to stick to the rhythm of that life when it is stranded like this in no place nowhere and it is rather slow, maybe too slow. But apart from that it is a film you have to let yourself slip into without any resistance, including to the accent of this northern region of the US, somewhere between Seattle and Vancouver.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID

A common question that people ask about movie directors is: which of his/her movies was your favorite? I wish to assert not only that John Sayles is probably the greatest American director alive today, but that "Limbo" was his best movie, tied with "Lone Star".The former tells the stories of several people in a small town in Alaska. We get to see a couple of stories: a corporate executive wants to log out a forest but leave a thin strip of trees so that no one can see it; the factory is closing down because the ocean is all fished out; and finally, Joe Gastineau (David Strathairn), Donna De Angelo (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and Noelle De Angelo (Vanessa Martinez) are trapped in limbo.The best part was the ending. A lot of people thought that the ending made no sense, but I thought that it added to the movie's feeling of the world coming apart. You have to see it. 10/10.

This is certainly a film of two halves. It feels like an upmarket TV movie at first but the acting and camera-work are superior to that aforementioned fare. There is a sense of a community evoked by Sayles's direction as he follows a diverse array of characters and overlaps their problems with the actions of others, while, at the same time, providing enough social commentary on the evils of capitalism that threaten the natural beauty of Alaska. This socio-political commentary is subtle enough because Sayles avoids stereotypes in his portrayal of the inhabitants. The first half feels fragmented at times but the presentation of the blossoming romance between the two main characters provides a seemingly stable counterpoint to the Altmanesque rendering of the tale.However, the film is really a tease. It abandons the first half in favor of the unexpected Lord of the Flies scenario involving the three main characters for the second half. Moreover, it changes mood full circle, using fear and anxiety as the main concerns of the three stranded characters, whose lives hang in the balance, in a state of limbo as it were. I wasn't sure how the first half related to the second, and I still feel uneasy about the total break Sayles employed between both parts. As a result, it feels like two films joined together. I also feel Sayles abandoned any sense of a multi-threaded narrative drive he successfully built into the first part in favor of the unexpected second part. The second part may symbolically allude to the film's title but it's also an abrupt digression of the preceding genre. Why bother with showing the first hour if it wasn't followed up? Why bother showing many characters in the first half, then abandoning their concerns in the later, as if it didn't matter? This is essentially a TV movie for the art-house crowd but one that challenges and frustrates in equal measure.