This ‘Eden’ Was No Paradise

Working with screenwriter Noah Pink from the bones of a true story, Ron Howard’s Eden is a philosophical thriller whose climax is long postponed as the characters think about how to respond to each other.

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Film

In Eden, Dr. Friedrich Ritter (Jude Law) and his companion, Dore Stauch (Vanessa Kirby), depart from Germany in 1929 to begin a new life on a remote island in the Galapagos. A fanatical Nietzschean, Ritter uses his self-sufficient isolation—undisturbed by the world’s deepening economic and political woes—to compose his coda to Nietzsche. For Ritter, God is dead, and Man is the measure of all things. “In pain we find truth and in truth there is salvation,” he insists. However, as an Übermensch, he doesn’t care much for Man (or women) except as material for his proposed Utopia.

Despising both morality and debauchery, he will be confronted by both when two sets of uninvited visitors intrude on his privacy. Ritter made the mistake of handing letters for publication in newspapers to the occasional passing ship and has no idea of the sensation he caused back home. He’s become a star, and his gravitational force attracted a young couple and their boy, grasping at the chance to start over on an island they perceived as Edenic.

Ritter and Dore dismiss Margret (Sydney Sweeny) and Heinz (Daniel Brühl) Wittmer as bourgeoise nuisances. Ritter shows the family to a cave with a spring giving only a trickle of water. He gives them no aid, refuses to help deliver Margret’s baby and tells them they’re on their own to survive or die. In life, “failure is inevitable” he declares, barely looking up as he continues to type his manifesto. Ritter and Dore will be surprised by the young couple’s industry as they build a tolerable home from field stone, tame a wild cow for milk and plant a garden.

The Wittmers are merely an annoying distraction. Trouble comes with a landing party led by a glamorous woman calling herself Baroness Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn (Ana de Armas) and including her pair of sycophant lovers. Ritter displays his contempt by greeting them stark naked, but the Baroness isn’t easily shocked. Oscar Wilde’s lesson about greed and vanity in her favorite book, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is entirely lost on her. She calls her dog Marquis (as in de Sade). Her encampment becomes a bacchanalia, and she intends to build a resort on the island, Hacienda Paradiso, if she can find investors.

Eden seems an odd choice for director Ron Howard, best known for blockbuster thrillers such as Apollo 13 and The DaVinci Code. Working with screenwriter Noah Pink from the bones of a true story, Eden is a philosophical thriller whose inevitable denouement is long postponed as the characters think about how to respond to each other. Although fissures arise within the island’s three groups, the plot can be understood as the struggle between avaricious evil (the Baroness), inhuman ideology (Ritter) and moral sentiment (Margret). It’s Lord of the Flies with castaways marooned by intent, not accident. Nature on that island is, as Charles Darwin remarked, red in tooth and claw. Wild dogs and feral pigs are as dangerous as the humans.

Howard filmed the inhospitable landscape with hues as austere as Ritter’s philosophy. Eden can probably be best appreciated on big screens where the desolate cinematography is given full dimension. It’s an intriguing tale, not a feel-good story.