In Gus Van Sant’s latest film of young melancholy, the bright teenager Annabel Cotton (Mia Wasikowska) shows her new friend and budding love Enoch Brae (Henry Hopper) her simple sketches of bugs and proudly declares herself a naturalist. In more than a dozen films over 25 years, Van Sant has been making the same statement. His films, often set in his hometown of Portland, Ore., are beautifully textured, consistently atmospheric and artfully framed with the lightest of touches.
He has grown a fondness for long tracking shots, but in “Restless,” his camera mainly stays closer, in distance and emotion, to its subjects: principally Enoch, adrift after the deaths of his parents in a car accident, and Annabel, who has three months to live before inoperable cancer kills her.
