Two fine performances, one underwritten script.
“The Absence of Eden” is a drama that wants to show us the pathos of illegal Mexican immigrants dealing with the U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement, or ICE for short. It also has two fine performances from the leads Zoe Saldana and Garret Hedlund, whose paths would eventually cross in what becomes a child trafficking story. So, it’s all consistent and sad, and it could be either an entertaining movie or an honest representation on life.
But the problem is the screenplay (co-written by Rick Rapoza and Saldana’s husband-director Marco Perego) is too short to expand on both sides of the equation. There are subplots that are all cut and paste within the Hedlund story, which I’ll talk about in a little bit, and if the movie took its time to explore those elements, it would have been a good movie.
Zoe Saldana plays Esmee, an undocumented woman who must cross the border, but has to face obstacles along the way. The journey involves trafficking and a little girl (Maeve Garay) whose mother (Morningstar Angeline) was taken away from her, and she must take care of the child. However, when she’s forced to become a drug dealer posing as a hotel housekeeper, the girl (who is nameless at this point) has to be held with the cartel as insurance. Or for something much worse.
Meanwhile, Garret Hedlund plays Shipp, an ICE agent struggling with his job arresting illegals with his partner Dobbins (Chris Coy), having an estranged relationship with his old man who just passed away, and falling for a Mexican woman named Yadira (Adrina Arjona) who has a little boy.
Eventually, Esmee and Shipp would cross paths in the story, when it comes to the fate of the unnamed girl.
I get the movie isn’t supposed to have a happy ending. After all, there have been great movies with that sense like “Chinatown” or “Miss Bala” from 2011. But that isn’t my problem with “The Absence of Eden.” There are so many well-acted elements of this film, regarding the emotional weight of Hedlund and the angry Saldana, and I can’t blame any of them for their own personal dramas. But as I finished watching it, I realized there’s not much pay-off in those elements. They just come and go, as if we’re supposed to forget about them, and focus on a bigger issue.
Trafficking, whether we’re talking about children or adults, is horrible, and the movie hints at that. We have to acknowledge that life is unfair to various groups of people, and I do feel bad for them. In fact, I just saw a movie earlier this week called “We Grown Now,” which is about two African-American boys in the early 90s, who live in what was once known as Chicago’s Cabrini-Green homes, and are distraught with their living conditions and how white cops would react to the recent violence in the city. I’ll publish that review next week, but that film was patient and more considerate about people with some unfortunate circumstances and passionate dreams.
“The Absence of Eden” has the potential to be a good or great movie of this genre, but I still think the running time length at 85 minutes takes away from the complexity of it. Again, Saldana and Hedlund are both great, but they deserve a more developed story.