Lila Neugebauer (2022)
Introducing Causeway at the London Film Festival (LFF), Lila Neugebauer and Jennifer Lawrence, the film’s star, stressed their excitement at first reading the screenplay (jointly credited to Elizabeth Sanders, Luke Goebel, and Ottessa Moshfegh). By the end of the screening, their enthusiasm was all the more striking. Causeway is well directed and very well acted. It’s the script that increasingly lets it down.
Lynsey (Lawrence) is an American soldier. She suffered a serious brain injury in Afghanistan and has been flown back to the US for treatment at a military rehabilitation centre. Following successful training and therapy under the supervision of sensitive, maternal Sharon (Jayne Houdyshell), she returns home to New Orleans, staying with Gloria (Linda Emond), her actual and ruefully feckless mother. Lynsey gets a job with a small local business that cleans private swimming pools. The work van is in bad shape and Lynsey gets it looked over at a garage, where she makes the acquaintance of James (Brian Tyree Henry), the garage owner. They hit it off, not emphatically but definitely, and, soon after, go out for the evening together. Lynsey makes clear to James that romance isn’t on the cards because she prefers women. James lost part of a leg in a road accident that killed his young nephew and, because he was driving and had been drinking, estranged James from his sister. He now lives alone in what used to be their mother’s house. He invites Lynsey to be his lodger – just for companionship – but she says no.
Almost as soon as she’s back in New Orleans, Lynsey is anxious to resume army service. Her doctor is unwilling to support this; despite Lynsey’s physical and cognitive progress, Dr Lucas (Stephen McKinley Henderson) feels she’s far from mentally and emotionally ready to go back to soldiering. One night, Lynsey persuades James to spend time with her by a swimming pool whose owner is away on holiday and, despite his hesitance, to join her in the water. When she kisses him with what seems purpose, James, understandably confused, tells Lynsey he’s sexually attracted to her only for her to confirm that the feeling’s not mutual. James, again understandably, stops seeing her. Dr Lucas eventually agrees, with reluctance, to sign off Lynsey as fit to resume her army career. After visiting her brother Justin (Russell Harvard) in prison, where he’s serving time for drugs offences, Lynsey changes her mind about returning to the army. In the final sequence of Causeway, she goes to James’s house, explains she’s staying in New Orleans and asks if he’s still willing for her to move in.
When actors enthuse about a script, it’s likely to be because of the dialogue rather than the structure. Fair enough and Causeway, as a series of lines is good, naturalistic writing. The screenplay has other merits too, with moments of unusual psychological insight. Sharon and Lynsey get on well; at one point, the older woman talks briefly about her own circumstances, prompting Lynsey to say, in a shocked tone, ‘What a terrible life’. She immediately apologises and Sharon kindly reassures her that ‘people often say things they don’t mean’. In the swimming pool scene, when James angrily demands to know why Lynsey kissed him on the lips, she replies, ‘I felt bad for you’, which makes him angrier still. She again tries to retract what she’s said, this time to no avail. On both occasions, you don’t feel that Lynsey has said something she doesn’t really mean – rather that her true feelings have slipped out.
Causeway also virtually eschews the tropes – or props – of coming-home-from-war trauma stories. Lynsey’s gruelling rehab doesn’t occupy much of the film’s ninety-minute running time. She doesn’t have nightmare flashbacks to the IED that caused her injuries. The script fails, however, to find much to replace what’s been taken out. Lila Neugebauer told the LFF audience that interviewing US military veterans was an important part of developing the piece yet, as the film goes on, Lynsey’s experience in Afghanistan has become no more than a means of structuring the storyline. Ditto her sexuality: it’s a problem in her friendship with James but nothing more. Not only is there no interaction between Lynsey and other women, save for her mother and Sharon; we get hardly any sense of what same-sex attachments she has had or wants. I’m naturally disposed to like films that end with the central relationship less than neatly resolved but the lack of resolution in this case is a copout. Causeway ends on a hopeful note only because it stops before James can even reply to Lynsey’s suggestion that she move in with him – before, that is, he can explain how he could cope living with a woman who now knows what he feels about her and who he knows can’t reciprocate.
The film is one of the first completed under the auspices of Excellent Cadaver, a production company set up by Jennifer Lawrence, who shares the producing credit for Causeway with Justine Polsky and was clearly the prime mover on the project. Lawrence showed terrific, vivid versatility and created unusually strong audience rapport in her early work – in Winter’s Bone (2010), Silver Linings Playbook (2012), American Hustle (2013) and Joy (2015), as well as the Hunger Games franchise. After the rubbishy Red Sparrow (2018) and the dire Don’t Look Up (2021), it’s good to see her back in a role that challenges her – even if the challenge is partly to subdue her natural qualities as a performer. As pensive, downbeat, blank-eyed Lynsey, who keeps to herself much of what she’s feeling, Lawrence is compelling and formidably consistent but you’re always aware of her self-discipline. From what he said in a recorded video message at the LFF screening, Brian Tyree Henry may be a similarly surprising choice for James; since, to this viewer anyway, he’s more of an unknown quantity, Henry doesn’t seem to be acting against expectations. And because the character of Lynsey remains opaque, Causeway turns into James’s story at least as much as hers.
This is the first feature film directed by Lila Neugebauer, a well-respected name in theatre (particularly after directing the 2018 Broadway revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery). Causeway has been cast with great care and Neugebauer’s direction of the actors, in scenes which typically involve just two characters, is impeccable. There’s fine work in the smaller roles from Jayne Houdyshell, Linda Emond, Stephen McKinley Henderson and Russell Harvard. The latter’s one scene is a particular highlight. We know that Justin is a drugs dealer; that he’s also deaf is rather startling (at least for those unfamiliar, as I was, with the actor concerned[1]). The signing by Russell Harvard and Jennifer Lawrence is highly expressive, especially when Justin tells his sister that he’s safer in prison than out.
The emotional wallop of this exchange is undeniable, even if it also gives the possibly misleading impression that seeing her brother again is what decides Lynsey against resuming her army career. (This rather detracts from what might otherwise seem a more subtly credible train of thought: getting the medical all-clear for return to action is an important target to which Lynsey is committed but the consequences of hitting that target are another matter.) Causeway makes little impression in visual terms. I wasn’t expecting wall-to-wall Mardi Gras but the setting is curiously anonymous – this New Orleans could be plenty of other places. To succeed as a film-maker, Lila Neugebauer will need to be more than an expert director of actors. Despite the limitations of this debut feature, though, you certainly want to see what she does next.
8 October 2022
[1] According to Wikipedia, Russell Harvard is part of a ‘third-generation deaf family … Although he is able to hear some sound with the use of a hearing aid, … he … considers American Sign Language to be his first language’.
