Monday, May 7, 2018

Mammoth Month of Moviepass #5: YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE

My apologies to take this long (five days) to get to a female director.


He sits in his closet and has the plastic wrap that goes around clothes around his head and face.  He breathes in and out.  This can't last for too long - surely he's got to lose some breath - but that's the idea.  This guy, Joe, less played and more subsumed by Joaquin Phoenix, is a man completely in a mess of a mental state.  Some of this is residue from a childhood we get just the barest snippets of (maybe, all told across the entire film, amounting to five or six seconds), and then there's some more (natural) trauma from being in combat.  What he saw there that traumatized him is less of a certainty; there may have been some bodies that were discovered in a truck or locked-off place.  But, whatever the case, this is a man so lost in himself that he has to go to violence - though, in his case, the righteous kind, to save the lives of the young, in particular sex trafficked children. 

The comparison that critics will immediately jump to, because they don't know what else to go to, is Taxi Driver, which goes without saying that that was itself paraphrasing The Searchers.  I say the critics kind of derisively (or I should say the one that got quoted in the trailer, "This is THIS GENERATION'S Taxi Driver", as if nothing else can be its own Taxi Driver without being compared to it first), though I may have thought of it for a moment if I hadn't been told to expect it.  What's far different is that this is not the same New York city (Lynn Ramsey takes some time, as Joe drives the streets of Manhattan at night going towards his target, for his POV of the city streets), and it's not the same kind of trauma.  We don't have narration to give us any perspective, so all we have is Phoenix's post-I'm Still Here bearded face and eyes that communicate so much, and these little snippets of a past, which... may be a little too... little?  Few?

I should note that I respect how Ramsey is showing us these details (she wrote the script from Jonathan Ames's book); she respects the audience's intelligence, or at least hopes they can get the gist of how Joe operates in a very underground way as a kind of go-to Avenger, and how he gets his "gigs" (from the Captain from The Wire no less!) and then this lends itself to how the plot unravels - after establishing how proficient, and how suddenly violent, Joe can be in the opening minutes, he gets his assignment to save a state senator's daughter who is kidnapped and being held in a private residence, and once he saves her it turns out things are a lot worse, including the involvement of a higher political figure - so that, you know, you got to follow along with this extreme visual style (editing by Herzog's usual editor, Joe Bini).  But at the same time if there's a flaw to the film, it's that, for me, these flashes to Joe's past are just too fleeting, too obtuse.

It's like, okay, there's been trauma and torture  But what about Joe's mother, who he still lives with and, to the best of his abilities, tries to take care of?  Was she complicit in these traumas that seemed to involve being wrapped in plastic, or did he forgive her in some way?  Once the story really kicks into gear it's clear anyone close to Joe will be in danger, but how Joe resolves this becomes more of a typical movie thing - people coming back at the protagonist for payback, the kick-ass guy with the hammer and/or gun will fight back again - and some of the more deliberate, psychologically strange parts of the first section of the film get a little lost.

This isn't to say You Were Never Really Here is too far gone to be engaged by, on the contrary this is another sign of how immensely and uniquely talented Ramsey is - I don't think I've seen a film like this edited this way before, not even her previous effort We Need to Talk About Kevin went for trying to use cinema as a way of displaying a fractured consciousness and memory - and she has two set pieces that stand out especially (one where she uses video cameras, not necessarily all synced up with the old tinny pop music playing, to show Joe going with his hammer through rooms and hallways; another is him singing softly with a man he Mr. Orange'd in his house).

And with Phoenix there he not merely carries the film, he is its unlikely (anti?)hero and tortured ghost.  He has lines in the film, but this is mostly a physical performance and so much of it relies on his face and eyes conveying everything.  This kind of material can be brutal (maybe Lars von Trier could have been attracted to this as well, that's how dark and desolate it feels), but with a great actor at the center you can get through anything.  He does that here.  On the downside, I'm not sure if those around him impress so much to play off of; Ekaterina Samsonov is the girl he saves and while she doesn't have a lot of scenes, I wasn't sure how she was playing them (or directed to play them).  Is she supposed to also be traumatized (what connects them in their final scene in the diner, I should add), or is she just not doing enough off of Phoenix?  Because Phoenix is already playing low-key and moody, her moodiness doesn't create any contrast, anything but the gloom that pervades this movie.

That's basically how I'd describe this film: it's good, really good, but also fully of a sort of gloom that makes me not want to watch it again, at least not for a very long time.  Sometimes those films are important to see and experience, and I'm glad Ramsey finally got to make a (finished) film again.  I'd even say the very last minute of this tries to go for some fleeting, bittersweet hope after 90 minutes of mental and viscerally-felt terror.  But... enter at your own risk.


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