Film Review: Remarkably Bright Creatures

I sat down in my living room with my iPad this past rainy Saturday and watched Lewis Pullman and Sally Field lay out every inch of the pain of their lives in the adaptation of Shelby Van Pelt’s novel, Remarkably Bright Creatures.

Marcellus, the octopus, which has been illegally jailed in an aquarium, as we Americans do with so many wild creatures, Remarkably Bright Creatures, sets the pace and the tone, which is maybe 35 miles an hour. And the tone is incredibly empathetic and kind, considering the treatment he received.

And so the deeply human characters unwind in front of us. And just as she has so many times before, Sally Field unveils her inner self, not miming a character laid out for her on the pages, but finding her own character from her own past and showing it in every line on her face, every tone of voice, and every slow-moving movement of her aging body.

There is also something quietly radical now about the way Sally Field presents herself on screen. There is no armor of attractiveness. No attempt to hide age, vulnerability, sadness, exhaustion, or loneliness. But I actually think it’s because she finds aging and human vulnerability attractive. Not performatively. Not politically. But artistically and emotionally true. She understands that a life fully lived eventually shows itself on the body, and instead of fighting that reality, she uses it. The result is a performance that feels almost unbearably intimate at times because there is absolutely nowhere for her to hide, and she refuses to hide anyway.

There are very few actresses of Sally Field’s stature who would allow themselves to be seen this way on screen now. Not “aging beautifully.” Not softened by flattering lighting and careful camera work. Actually seen. As a woman who has lived, suffered, aged, loved, lost, and carried all of it forward physically. That honesty gives her enormous power as a performer because we are not watching vanity manage a role. We are watching a human being reveal herself.

And Pullman? He’s magnificent. He is as good as she is, just younger. Actually, everyone in the cast is as good as she is. And her friends? I should only hope to have those kinds of lifelong friends in my circle of collaboration. But you can only get those when you’ve lived somewhere forever and they know every single secret, and you don’t care years later after the tragedies and pain.

The film is really about grief, though. About the way grief calcifies people. Sally Field’s character is not simply sad. She has emotionally frozen herself for years. Pullman’s character carries abandonment around like a shadow. Almost everyone in the story is trapped somehow. Marcellus is trapped physically in the aquarium. The humans are trapped emotionally inside guilt, memory, loneliness, routine, and the lives they built after heartbreak. The story slowly, carefully, unwinds all of that.

And it does it without glamour. Nobody is saving the world. Nobody is rich. Nobody is delivering giant speeches about the meaning of life. The film respects ordinary people and small-town life in a way films rarely do anymore. It doesn’t mock them. It doesn’t turn them into irony. It simply watches them with compassion.

I loved the book. Jenna Bush Hager brought it to her book club, but apparently Sally Field signed on after reading three chapters of the galley, which her son received before the book was published. I’m actually glad about that. It means that Reese Witherspoon didn’t have a chance to bring her shiny buddies into this particular novel. I think it’s all the better for it.

The screenplay was written and the film directed by Olivia Newman, who you will remember from Where the Crawdads Sing. Newman first drew attention with the independent film First Match, a raw and emotionally layered story about a teenage girl navigating survival and identity through Brooklyn wrestling culture. That film had the same patience and restraint she brings here. She seems deeply uninterested in manipulation. She trusts silence. She trusts faces. She trusts actors to carry emotional weight without announcing it to the audience every five seconds. I think she’s a master at bringing in actors with tremendous depth to play roles that must have that depth because she will never overload dialogue to make the point. You have to bring it. You have to show it. You can’t just tell it.

The pacing matters too. A couple of times while watching, I wondered why it wasn’t brought to the big screen first because it would be marvelous there. But part of what makes the film work is that it refuses the rhythm modern audiences have been trained to expect. It does not assault us with editing, explosions, noise, or emotional cues every ten seconds. It asks us to sit still for a while. To watch people. To listen. To notice. Honestly, the film itself feels a little bit like going backward in time emotionally, and I mean that as the highest compliment.

And the octopus? It just so happens that after I read the book, I also read about octopuses, and who knew they’re so smart? Smarter than us maybe. And Marcellus is fabulous in the role. Sally Field mentioned in an interview that she loved working with him and that he brought more to his role than some of the actors she’s worked with in the past.

Don’t miss this film. If you have a family, watch it with them. Talk about it afterward. Or watch it by yourself.

At this moment in time, when both our country and the world seem to be spinning out of control, there is tremendous hope in recognizing that going back to nature, and all that it has to teach us about perhaps living a little less with the diversionary explosions of shiny objects, might behoove us and make us happier in the end.