“The Chronology of Water” Is an Extraordinary Directorial Début

But get away Lidia does, and, finally free of paternal authority, she’s out of control: drinking and taking drugs, partying hard, flunking out, targeting a gentle guitar-playing boy named Phillip (Earl Cave) for a hearts-and-flowers romance even as she mocks and berates him. She goes to rehab, marries Phillip, gets pregnant, leaves him, and moves in with her sister. Through it all—her terrorized childhood, her reckless young adulthood, her bereavement—she writes in journals, fervently and lyrically, grabbing at experience and emotion with desperate urgency. At a roommate’s urging, Lidia joins a creative-writing workshop taught by Ken Kesey (Jim Belushi). Kesey recognizes her literary talent and also empathizes with her over the loss of her child, having been deeply marked by the death of one of his sons in a road accident. As Lidia’s literary career takes off—and she begins to write the book on which the movie is based—aspects and figures from her turbulent past reappear both in memory and in physical form. The effect, as seen from the relative serenity of a family life that Lidia eventually forges, is of a retrospective sense of destiny—of a life that writing has, in both senses of the word, saved.

“The Chronology of Water” compresses the overflowing story of Lidia’s turbulent life into aphoristic flashes and lyrical outpourings. The leaps in time have the eerie effect of effacing time—the layered succession of images implying their simultaneity in Lidia’s mind. Stewart’s method of memory leaps suggests that a storehouse of memories is, essentially, simultaneous, with no fixed sequence beside the deep grooves of connection cut in the mind by the inescapable force of emotion. The movie’s remarkable approach to memory presents it as the opposite of free association—call it compulsory association, the suppression of freedom by the power of ingrained and imposed patterns.

The movie is built around such patterns, and its constant leaping among emotionally explosive fragments reflects the subject of Yuknavitch’s memoir. The film’s relentless intensity, its concentration on highs and lows, on extremes of sensation and emotion, is in itself a profound view of the very nature of trauma. This is a childhood that had all its ordinariness burned out of it by the linking of even seemingly trivial gestures (an offering of candy, a bath, a swim, the dust in a corner of a room) to an entire array of physical and mental agonies. Stewart conveys the idea of physical pain and physical pleasure with imaginative fervor, and one of her prime inspirations—in a scene of Lidia and two other women in a sexual relationship—is to evoke, by way of extreme closeups, a sense of carnal textures. This is eroticism without prurience.

The punctuation of the narrative with non-chronological flashes and scene is consistent through almost the whole film. Sometimes Stewart runs clusters of powerful moments together to play like mini-episodes. Yet the dramatic effect of this fragmentation is to suppress any sense of an arc. As a result, “The Chronology of Water” is a movie with little forward motion; it lacks the dramatic momentum to carry the story through its series of immediate sensations. This is where fidelity of adaptation suggests its limitations. The film’s impression-based form is caught between sensation and approximation; very little is presented with concrete directness. A more tensile drama would involve stepping back, seeing Lidia in a wider context, observing her literary activity and her literary life—the present tense of the writerly memory—in more practical detail. Instead, “The Chronology of Water” risks depicting the present tense of the established writer’s life as a predestined triumph rather than an ongoing activity. The result is a first-person story with much of the person removed.

The form also has an effect on Poots’s performance. At one level, it is remarkably virtuosic, displaying an uncanny ability to incarnate Lidia persuasively from high school to middle age. However, it’s constrained by Stewart’s snippet-centered style, which means that, instead of developing emotion, Poots can only emblematize it, including in scenes of the limited and clichéd passage between laughter and tears. Stewart’s rapt attention to Poots’s powerful extremes of expression is at odds with the dramatic unfolding of character along with narrative. Still, the fragmentary approach does allow a few supporting performances, in roles clipped into dispersed bits, to shine. Epp, as Lidia’s father, offers a wide variety of expressions in a narrow spectrum of tyranny; Belushi plays Kesey with gravelly whimsy and lifeworn charm; and Birch, as the adult Claudia, projects in each glance an abiding poise that’s a constant exertion of inner strength.

Even with its elisions and frustrations, “The Chronology of Water” reflects a directorial conception that escapes from the familiar pathways of narrative filmmaking and grafts an element of the avant-garde into its drama. In the process, the film evokes a basic tension in the history of cinema: the eternal directorial struggle to turn cumbersome equipment, organizational complexity, and the sheer fact of collaboration into a form of personal expression. To Stewart’s bold defiance of the habits of narrative, she adds another layer of difficulty in finding a way to personal expression: the film’s relationship to its literary source. Devotion and fidelity may constrain imagination rather than inspiring it, and Stewart’s adaptation, for all its ingenuity and audacity, falls short of transformation. ♦