There is a moment in Drift, the character study from filmmaker Anthony Chen, that you know is inevitable. (It’s now playing in New York, opens in L.A. on February 16th, and goes wide on February 23rd.) You spend so much of this carefully constructed film’s running time bracing for it, aware that this tale of a woman named Jacqueline — quietly yet powerfully played by Cynthia Erivo — is building to a confessional crescendo. A Liberian citizen who’s been living in London for years, she now finds herself in Greece, wandering the beaches and avoiding the authorities. Jacqueline has little money and no place to stay; she sleeps in a small cave by the shore, hidden from the road. Glimpses of her past involving a posh girlfriend (Honor Swinton-Byrne) suggest a comfortable existence. Ditto the flashbacks to her middle-class family back in the West African country, who can afford to hire armed security guards while intimations of civil war percolate around them.
Jacqueline had gone back to visit her parents and her pregnant sister. Something horrible happened. We are not sure what, though we can hazard a few guesses. It’s this woman’s present, however, that occupies us. She is not a tourist. Nor is she a political refugee, though she isn’t above giving well-to-do travelers a foot massage while they lounge on the beach for a quick Euro or two, like many migrants do. When an African man selling trinkets on a promenade tries to befriend her, Jacqueline recoils from his gestures of solidarity. When a European man asks how she got here, Jacqueline replies, “Same as everyone else. Plane. Ferry. Boat. Luck.”
She is simply a lost soul, and Drift telegraphs early on that it’s not a social-issues drama about immigrants and borders, or interested in being the cinematic equivalent of an Op-Ed piece. Whether you think this movie should delve deeper into that ongoing crisis happening throughout Europe or has shirked a responsibility to address such things is subjective — the same thing applies to the political instability that eventually bring child soldiers to the doorstep of Jacqueline’s family. But Chen (The Breaking Ice) and the screenwriters Susanne Farrell and Alexander Maksik don’t exploit real-world maladies any more than they make them their focus. The effects of extraordinary trauma, and how people do or do not process it, is what they’re chasing after.
These filmmakers also aren’t interested in using Jacqueline’s story as another excuse to trot out a white savior, which is your initial fear once an American ex-pat arrives on the scene. Having relocated to Greece and still harboring her own personal pain, Callie (Alia Shawkat) makes her living giving guided tours of nearby ruins. She sees Jacqueline milling about the cliffsides and chats her up in between the history lessons for visitors. Callie clocks that this woman with the wary eyes and the blatantly fake story about a husband waiting for her back at their hotel is hiding something. But she does not push or pry too much. Callie just offers kindness and sympathy.
Alia Shawkat and Cynthia Erivo in ‘Drift.’
Nikos Nikolopoulos/Utopia Pictures
For a while, Drift follows this unlikely duo as Jacqueline slowly starts to let Callie in bit by bit, charting what may or may not be a burgeoning bond and is definitely a lifeline for this woman desperately trying to hold on to her dignity. The flashback interludes, however, start getting longer, and less cryptic. Which brings us back to the scene we know is coming, and the importance of Cynthia Erivo to this endeavor. The British actor has racked up an insanely impressive resume, been nominated for an Oscar, won Tonys and Grammys, and is a world-class singer. (She’s about to play the Wicked Witch of the West in the screen adaptation of the Broadway hit Wicked.) Here, she has to unpack Jacqueline’s painful experience, and do so in a way in which a performance of suggestion, silent glances and skittishness isn’t suddenly undone by the admission of having her world cracked into tiny pieces. Erivo has to give you a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown that doesn’t render everything before it superfluous or feel incompatible — to avoid the whiplash of a 0-to-120mph melodramatic acceleration.
And that’s exactly what you get as this person left adrift finally lets the missing piece of the film’s puzzle fall into place. To say that Erivo does justice to that moment is to undersell the humanity she brings to this character, the respect she has for the scars this person harbors and the sheer grace with which she avoids a single false or grandstanding note. She turns this into a small, even modest movie with a timebomb at its center, and the way such a minute explosion packs such maximum impact is due to her. Erivo is not the only reason to see Drift. But the actor most certainly is the reason to see it ASAP.
