In the external world, our man starts out confidently alone on his small sailboat, apparently on a journey that others considered ill-advised. We don't really know that much about him, but I personally find him to be arrogantly cocooned -- he thinks he's safe, surely he thinks he's going to succeed, but he's clearly not all that prepared, having relied too much on his GPS and other tech. He doesn't know what he doesn't know. When his boat gets wrecked by an adrift container, he's forced to consider all these things. And as he loses all of these material things (technology, then the boat, then bits of the raft), he's forced to dig ever deeper into himself to see if he has the will to survive. The ultimate battle is between him and himself. I hadn't thought about the human connection really until someone pointed it out in a previous post, but he starts out fractured from his presumed loved ones and is out on the water alone. He spends the entire movie alone, surviving on his own, but at the end, he has to take someone's hand, accept help from another, to ultimately survive. All may be lost, but no man is an island.

I would like to offer the perhaps contrarian view that "All is Lost" is not a "Hero's Journey" story -- it doesn't conform to the conventions of that popular screenwriting paradigm. The "Hero's Journey" is primarily a young person's game; it's the psychological journey of someone looking forward to most of his Biblical quota of 3 score and 10 years of life. In contrast, Our Man has probably used up his quota and then some. (Robert Redford has born in 1936: do the math.) Even if Our Man survives his misfortune -- which in the final cut of the film is ambiguous -- his days are drastically numbered compared to, say, another character Redford portrayed fighting to survive the harsh elements -- Jeremiah Johnson (1972). It seems to me that the psychological journey in "All is Lost" has a different travel itinerary, a different agenda. It is a final reckoning, a tallying of the pluses and minuses, the successes and failures of his life. With a focus on the minuses as indicated in the V.O. at the start: "I'm sorry... I know that means little at this point, but I am. I tried. I think you would all agree that I tried. To be true, to be strong, to be kind, to live, to be right. But I wasn't..." In his interview with the New York Times promoting the movie, Robert Redford, explained what the story meant to him by citing the poet T.S. Eliot from "Four Quartets": "There is only the trying. The rest is not our business." Redford said was his favorite line about the current stage of his own life. The movie brought to my mind the words of another poet, William Butler Yeats: Though the leaves are many, the root is one; Through all the lying days of my youth I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun; Now I may wither into the truth. The psychological journey of our latter days is a journey involving loss --- the stripping away of all the excess baggage we really no longer need, although like Our Man, we desperately cling to it, tenaciously hold on until time and chance force it out of our hands. In the course of the "All is Lost", every artifice, every tool, every creature comfort, every instrument for Our Man's survival is lost. He has no choice but to wither into the truth of himself. (Act III Man vs. Self)

"the stripping away of all the excess baggage we really no longer need, although like Our Man, we desperately cling to it, tenaciously hold on until time and chance force it out of our hands" -- I totally agree with this, whatever age he is. But your take, interestingly, is really about the film. When I was reading the screenplay, I pictured a younger guy -- but I I haven't seen the movie. I guess I had sort of a vague image of a 40-ish Redford, and a guy who could go on to rectify his mistakes. (Since his age isn't specified in the screenplay, we're both correct - don't mean to suggest otherwise.) It didn't really occur to me until this moment how the choice of an actor can totally change a film's meaning. Now I would totally love to know what J.C. Chandor thinks the movie is about.

Chandor pitched the story and the role to Redford at the 2011 Sundance where his "Margin Call" was being premiered. So Chandor apparently conceived the story with a character on the far side of his life journey in mind. The spec script was written to show to Redford.

Melinda, you have summed up my take almost entirely. We really have little knowledge of Our Man's inner life. No Wilson volleyball or notebook as in Life of Pi to hear his inner thoughts. It's all right out there on the surface to see. And talk about so obvious, you don't see it: I never made the connection about that last shot -- taking someone's hand -- until it was brought up here. Of course, that was super intentional on Chandor's part. The only other human in the movie AND the only human contact Our Man makes throughout his ordeal. But as you say and as I've noted elsewhere this week, the journey strips down Our Man until he has to decide if he has the will to survive. In some ways, this is one of the most existential movies ever made.

To your point, Paul, here is a quote from Chandor: ""It's about this guy coming to grips with the end of his life".

Paul, I think you are on target. The script starts off with a man expressing regrets. This is the type of thing common to people in the latter stages of their life. As one ages, the chances to do new things or redo old things decline, which naturally leads to reflection and regret. "Now I may wither into the truth." Great line. And Our Man's truth emerges as a guy not ready to give up his life, as flawed as it is.

HUGE MEGA MAJOR SPOILER BE WARNED :) This is a very interesting conversation about a great movie. But contrary to many, I don't see the ending the same way especially in light of what Chandor has said about this movie being about a man coming to terms with the END of his life. I see the ending as the Man coming to terms with his death. Granted, the final images are ambiguous - the outcome could go both ways: life or death (which is what is so great about it). To me, the Protag here follows the traditional disunity > unity path but not in the way that is used by the majority (= metaphorical death to Life).

Marija, you know what's interesting about this take? If he was coming to grips with his own mortality, why didn't he just give himself up to drowning? That is not to say I think your take is wrong. On the contrary. I think you may be right, at least on one level of Our Man's psyche. He is preparing himself to die... just not on these terms. Not where someone or something else -- a Chinese shipping container and a series of storms -- determines his fate. HE wants to control his fate... at least a little longer. But I'll tell you this: Your observation made me go back and read his opening V.O. And it's REALLY easy to read that as a suicide note. So it's not something he actively pursues, it still feels like he is trying to come to grips with his flawed, even failed life. Here's an interesting thought experiment: What if he hadn't been rudely interrupted by the shipping container? Is it possible he was sailing off into the unknown as a final act of living? Perhaps that at some point, he was prepared to jump into the ocean and let himself drown a la Spaulding Gray? We will never know, but again, if you read Our Man's opening V.O. in a certain light, it could easily be interpreted as a death notice. And perhaps, as you suggest, Marija, he will have achieved Unity... but in a different way than we typically think of it.

Actually, my mind isn't made up one way or the other and I don't mind the ambiguity, I think it makes for interesting observations and conversations. I don't believe he was on a suicidal journey (but that's an intersting observation as well). I believe he wrote that note because he truly thought he was going to die so if we follow that thought to its logical conclusion, he survives. I like Melinda's observation about him reaching out to another human being for survival and as they say, nothing is ever too late. I just can't shake that nagging feeling that in the end, he gives in, peacefully.

So what's the arc of transformation for Our Man? Does he start out in a state of disunity? Yes, I think he does. Does he undergo a process of deconstruction? Yes, I think he does. I would even call it a a process of destruction. The ordeal destroys all the creature comforts, all the buffers that have made his voyage through life to that point something of a luxury cruise. (That's not a cheap dinghy he was sailing. He had to have attained some material success in life to afford a boat outfitted like that.) Does he undergo a phase of reconstruction? Here, I'm not so sure. Maybe, but not so much -- or maybe something different quantitatively and qualitatively from the reconstruction phase of a younger man's "Hero's Journey"? Might it be the case that at this point in his life journey, it's more of a process of re-discovery than reconstruction? Re-discovery of core values, of essential truths about himself. Like T.S. Eliot said in another line from his "Four Quartets": "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." Or in the case of Our Man, know himself for the first time.