David Lowery (2013)

The intriguing title of David Lowery’s first feature is, according to the director in a press interview when the film premiered at Sundance, ‘a misreading of an old American folk song that captured the right “classical, regional” feel’.  Whatever that may mean.  Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara play Bob Muldoon and Ruth Guthrie, husband and wife bank robbers whose criminal career ends when Ruth, pregnant with their first child, shoots and critically injures a local law officer, and Bob takes the rap and goes to prison.  Several years later, shortly before their daughter Sylvie’s fourth birthday, Bob escapes from prison; he goes on the run but all he really wants is to get back to his wife and the child he’s never seen.  Patrick Wheeler, the lawman Ruth injured, embarks on a tentative, ambivalent quest to track down Bob and build a relationship with Ruth and Sylvie.   A legend at the start of the movie announces ‘This was Texas’, a clear indication that the story is going to be ‘timeless’.  At one point a record plays on a jukebox in a bar; at another, music is briefly heard on a car radio; there’s a bit of picking out of countryish tunes on a guitar.  None of these yields a chronological clue and this is otherwise a Texas without televisions or telephones or electric light or natural light.  (It’s the ideal terrain for a man on the run.)  Bradford Young’s cinematography won a prize at Sundance this year and the lighting is very skilful but if there’s a single shot of a face that isn’t at least partly shadowed I missed it.

David Lowery says that the ‘films I love are very precise and every shot means something, every shot should convey something new’.  After a while, all that the shots in Ain’t Them Bodies Saints convey is Lowery’s determination to impress.  It’s hard work to find the actors inside the dark-toned visuals.  Casey Affleck is relaxed and funny in the opening scenes.  Once he’s in jail or escaped from it, his characterisation comes to a halt:  what he does is purely behavioural.  The same goes for Rooney Mara’s largely monotonous playing of Ruth.   The identical twins Jacklynn and Kennadie Smith, who play Sylvie, are more emotionally expressive than Mara although when Ruth asks Sylvie, ‘What’s wrong, sweet girl?  Why are you so quiet?’ you don’t know what she’s on about because this child has hardly ever spoken.  Ben Foster as Wheeler is by far the best thing in Ain’t Them Bodies Saints – even in half-light, he’s able to suggest divided feelings.  With Keith Carradine as, in the words of Richard Brody, ‘a Machiavellian patriarch’.

11 September 2013