EDEN
(director/writer: Ron Howard; screenwriters: story & screenplay by Noah Pink & Howard; cinematographer: Mathias Herndl; editor: Matt Villa; music: Hans Zimmer; cast: Sydney Sweeney (Margret Wittmer), Ana de Armas (The Baroness), Vanessa Kirby (Dora Ritter), Jude Law (Dr. Friedrich Ritter), Daniel Bruhl (Heinz Wittmer), Jonathan Tittel (Harry Wittmer); Runtime: 129; MPAA Rating: NR; producers: William M. Connor, Stuart Ford, Brian Grazer, Karen Lunder, Ron Howard, Patrick Newall; Imagine Entertainment; 2024)
“An unpleasant bunch of characters populate Eden.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
Ron Howard (“A Beautiful Mind”/”Hillbilly Elegy”) directs this obscure adventure tale from a story he wrote with Noah Pink. Though listed as a true historical story, it’s most likely an invented story of island survivors that quite possibly could have happened but was never confirmed. It’s an ensemble piece, performed by actors who speak English with thick German accents.
In the early 1930s, the widower philosopher Heinz Wittmer (Daniel Brühl) arrives in Floreana, one of the remote Galápagos Islands, with his second wife Margaret (Sydney Sweeney) and his tuberculosis suffering son from his first marriage, Harry (Jonathan Tittel). Heinz was inspired by the writings of Dr. Friedrich Ritter (Jude Law), who with his MS stricken-wife Dora Strauch (Vanessa Kirby), left an increasingly fascist German modern society in the 1920s for the primitive island so Friedrich can write about his plan to save the world in a new society.
The Wittmers face hostility from Dr. Ritter (he shuns neighbors), and later from the newly arriving Baroness Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn (Ana de Armas), who shows up with an entourage of three male lovers and plans on building a luxury hotel on the shore. She also wants the island to herself.
The levelheaded Margaret tries to befriend the hostile Baroness, who steals their food and then invites her over with her irate husband to dine in their home on the stolen food.
The island has good weather and a native population that’s not hostile to the settlers, but wild dogs run through it and the backward small native population refuse to work together so the island can function.
An unpleasant bunch of characters populate Eden, as its dystopian tone and its slow pace is a downer.
Of the German foreigners who went to the island, only four survived. So much for Eden being paradise.
It played at the Toronto Film Festival.
REVIEWED ON 9/24/2024 GRADE: C+
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