Seagrass – Substance Crumbling Under Vague Atmosphere

Divorce stories are always a blast, aren’t they? From Kramer vs Kramer to Marriage Story, the rumbling fault lines of that hallowed institution rubbing against one another in real-time have made for some of the most compelling cases of family drama in theatre and cinema alike. Much of that compelling friction is derived from the fact that, unlike most cinematic battles, there often exists an inherent desire from both parties to work things out smoothly. Husband and wife aren’t out to destroy each other, but sometimes relationships just crumble under the pressure of misplaced expectations, and the equally misplaced drive to put the pieces back together results in some of our most tragically relatable stories. Seagrass is one such instance of attempted reconciliation in the face of unavoidable marital calamity, but much like the couple at its centre, Meredith Hama-Brown’s directorial debut is left disillusioned at the prospect of success.

Within minutes of observing Judith’s (Maki) and Steve’s (Roberts) dynamic, it becomes entirely apparent that their escape to a seaside retreat, complete with group couples’ therapy, is about as inevitable as it is necessary. This is no ordinary Canadian getaway, however, as the package comes complete not only with counselling services for flailing marriages, but also barely-supervised activities for the children of these disintegrating family units—a perfect chance for the tykes to pretend they have no idea what’s going on all day as they play tag and jump over half-buried rocks in the sand! Just as Judith and Steve find themselves at an impenetrable impasse, then, so too do their two young daughters, Stephanie and Emmy (Breitkreuz and Marthaller), find themselves at the precipice of a challenging and confusing moment in their inexperienced lives.

Essentially an amalgam of about five or six critically acclaimed films one would probably find slapped with the A24 logo, Seagrass attempts to bridge the distance between its characters—or rather, enhance it—by way of its vacant sense of atmosphere, slow and pointed with its camerawork and spacey with the interactions that fill those silent voids. Hama-Brown seems attuned to the notion that actions speak louder than words, but in trying to relay this philosophy, the film finds immense difficulty in presenting its conflict with any sense of purpose outside the obvious sketches it passes as characters. It wants to observe its players as they make their way towards unavoidable disaster—like the Titanic on its collision course with the iceberg—but the creative choices she made to get there feel incredibly overdone and not at all passionate in their execution; the inclusion of a karaoke performance or children listlessly hanging their arms over a ship don’t ring with the emotional truth of a film like Aftersun, but rather come across like a film student’s attempts to replicate that same sensation.

Sadly, that hackneyed sensation enhanced by the dialogue isn’t helped by the film’s poor mixing of it, but the line delivery from its four leads often comes across as largely unconvincing anyway. This seems to have two slightly different effects depending on who’s reading off the script; the adults attempt to express the dying passion of a marriage in its last gasps of breath, but come across somewhat stale due to the inauthenticity of the words communicating it. The two children, meanwhile, are doing the best they can, but their own dialogue’s flatness does no favours to the dreaded stigma facing child actors in general.

Much of Hama-Brown’s emotional drive appears to be based in her film’s sense of spectral ambience hanging over the entire seaside setting. Most scenes are bookended by shots of waves hitting the rocks, which comes across as a decent enough symbol, specifically when the film uses it in its final moments; throughout, though, Seagrass relies far too heavily on this motif to the point where audiences simply have had enough by the time it finally gets interesting. Combined with unnecessary slow zooms and the questionable floating camerawork that appears at two critical junctures in the plot but feels entirely antithetical to the rest of the film’s style (perhaps by design, but poor design regardless), the film is often formally confused, supplementing a desire for subtlety with vacuous visual techniques.

It’s only in the final moments that Meredith Hama-Brown lets audiences actually see the titular seagrass onscreen, and when finally gazing upon the wet flora stuck to the rocks which was constantly battered by ceaseless waves, it becomes clear that it is a metaphor for the children stuck in an undesirable position. There are, then, flashes of potential sprinkled scantly across Seagrass, but the film’s indulgent sense of craft is unfortunately too scattered to bring the required concentration that the story of this family fully deserves. The film is, at least partially, based on Hama-Brown’s own experiences, so it’s a shame that this drive doesn’t manifest in more direction for the final product.

still courtesy of Game Theory Films

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Julian Malandruccolo

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