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    Review: ‘In the Company of Rose’ Is a Pleasant Portrait

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    When the theater and film director James Lapine first met Rose Styron, he knew her as William Styron’s widow. He learned there was a lot more to her.In 2014, the film and theater director James Lapine was invited to a Martha’s Vineyard lunch with the writer Rose Styron, the widow of the novelist William Styron (“The Confessions of Nat Turner,” “Sophie’s Choice”). At the lunch, Lapine proceeded to record an impromptu interview with Rose. Unlike lesser mortals, Lapine (a protean force in American arts who wrote the book for and directed Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George,” among other things) has the means to spin a feature film out of such an encounter.Composed of archival footage and interviews done with more polished equipment over the years, “In the Company of Rose” is a pleasant portrait of an admittedly rarefied world, but one that doesn’t transcend its vanity-project origins. Perhaps it doesn’t intend to. As Lapine, who narrates the film, admits, “I’ve often jumped into projects without really knowing what I was doing.” In her account of her life, Rose, too, seems to have moved forward without too much calculation. She recalls being unimpressed by Styron at a reading for his first novel, “Lie Down In Darkness,” they only clicked later, in Rome, where Rose was studying and William was living on a fellowship.Rose is kind, cheerful, frank, and she has a knack for telling stories laden with famous figures without sounding as if she’s name-dropping. She typed Styron’s work for nearly a decade. On becoming interested in human rights, she traveled for Amnesty International. She says that she and her husband resembled a stereotypically 1950s American couple, and that they managed their marriage “mainly by not talking about things, instead of talking about them.” But when Styron had depression in the 1980s she was a stalwart helpmate in his recovery, and encouraged him to write “Darkness Visible,” the memoir that has become one of his best known works. As existences in rarefied worlds go, this one plays as well-lived.In the Company of RoseNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘The Jump’ Review: A Seaman’s Story of a Daring Escape

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      This documentary looks back at a Cold War defection drama that took place off the coast of Massachusetts.In its first half-hour, the documentary “The Jump” brings a bracing immediacy to a 50-year-old Cold War incident. In 1970, a Lithuanian sailor, Simas Kudirka, jumped from a Soviet trawler onto a U.S. Coast Guard vessel off Martha’s Vineyard in an effort to defect from the Soviet Union. (The boats were moored alongside each other for talks on fishing rights.)The Soviet crewmen were allowed to forcibly remove Kudirka from the Coast Guard ship and take him home, where he would presumably meet a chilling fate. The episode led to protests in the United States.To lay out these events, the early scenes principally crosscut among three people. Kudirka revisits the Coast Guard vessel he had jumped to a half-century earlier and energetically points out what happened and where.The director, Giedre Zickyte, interweaves Kudirka’s recollections with testimony from the ship’s captain, Cmdr. Ralph W. Eustis, and Lt. Cmdr. Paul E. Pakos, its executive officer, to create a fluid account that shows how the day unfolded from multiple perspectives.When the story shifts to the Soviet Union, Zickyte introduces a K.G.B. interrogator who recalls questioning Kudirka. The sailor received a 10-year sentence but was freed in 1974. In the film, Kudirka revisits a prison where he was held.“The Jump” grows less exciting after that, partly because Kudirka, its most engaging storyteller, was necessarily in the background of efforts to secure his freedom, and partly because his eventual release owed more to incredible luck than to a political breakthrough. In the film, Henry Kissinger recalls that President Gerald R. Ford directly intervened on Kudirka’s behalf. “No professional diplomat would ever have done that,” he says.The JumpNot rated. In Lithuanian and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Apple TV and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Somewhere With No Bridges’ Review: Of Men and Memories

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      Charles Frank’s documentary about a Martha’s Vineyard man tries to turn a shadow into a portrait.In the compact documentary “Somewhere With No Bridges,” the director Charles Frank sets out to put a heartbeat to a memory. The movie’s ostensible subject, Richie Madeiras, was 44 in October 1999 when he fell from his boat. Days later, divers pulled his body from the water a few hundred yards off Martha’s Vineyard, where he had deep roots, made lifelong friends and worked as a shellfish constable helping to protect the island’s precious natural resources. A local paper said of Madeiras: “Friends and family say he was born to fish.”The genesis of this documentary was the enduring impact that Madeiras’s death had on friends and family, including on Frank’s father, Dale. Charles Frank was just about to turn 5 in October 1999. “My family likes to joke that before the age of 12, I don’t remember anything,” he says in voice-over soon after the movie begins. That isn’t true, he continues, as the camera holds on a handsomely framed aerial shot of lapping ocean waves. He remembers how his father reacted to the loss of his close friend.“He stepped out of his car and collapsed into my mother’s arms,” Charles says, as the waves keep coming and he methodically draws out the words, as if from the deep. “It was the first time I sensed that something was wrong, and it was the first time I saw him cry.”This childhood memory serves as a kind of creative statement of intent and an emotional through line for “Somewhere With No Bridges,” which seeks to explore Madeiras’s life and legacy through its many traces. This effort emerges piecemeal through a combination of archival imagery, original interviews and supplementary material, including a great many shimmering beauty shots of the island and its residents, though primarily men, on the water. Much like the photograph of Madeiras that Frank develops in an old-fashioned chemical bath, the documentary tries to turn a shadow into a portrait.That never satisfyingly happens, partly because Frank never figures out what story he’s trying to tell: his, his father’s or Madeiras’s. Richie appears to have been a vividly charismatic, memorable figure, one who, decades after his death, his friends and family easily conjure up with tears and sweet and rollicking reminiscences. He was strong, mischievous and could take on a couple of guys at a bar all by himself. He loved, and he was loved in turn. Yet even as Frank keeps questioning and exploring, Madeiras and the full sweep of his life remain as out of focus as this documentary, an essay without a coherent thesis.
      The title “Somewhere With No Bridges” refers to Martha’s Vineyard, which can only be reached via boat or plane. It’s a beguiling, resonant title that starts to seem considerably less romantic or helpful as the documentary evolves, intentionally or not, into a portrait of a cloistered community of men who fish, hunt, talk and talk some more, occasionally play ball and spend a lot of time on the water. There are women here, yes, but mostly what you are left with are men and their sorrow, notably that of Dale Frank, whose heart still breaks for Richie Madeira and whose filmmaker son, Charles, clearly yearns to understand why.Somewhere With No BridgesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour. Rent or buy on Amazon, Apple TV and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More