Trey Edward Shults (2019)
The young writer-director Trey Edward Shults’s third feature (the first of his I’ve seen) has a promising set-up. The central characters are a middle-class African-American family in present-day Florida. Tyler Williams (Kelvin Harrison Jr) is a star of his high-school wrestling team, expected to progress to higher education in the near future. As well as training and studying, he likes partying, with his girlfriend Alexis (Alexa Demie). She and Tyler’s younger sister Emily (Taylor Russell) are students at the same high school. The Williams parents, Ronald (Sterling K Brown) and Catherine (Renée Elise Goldsberry), run their own business. Ronald is a proud, sternly competitive father – and the main reason why Tyler conceals a serious shoulder problem that he’s developed. He ignores a doctor’s advice to have immediate surgery. Tyler prefers to wait until the current school wrestling season is over, to run the risk of aggravating the injury in the meantime.
This tense scenario emerges clearly enough but has to fight with Shults’s technique to do so. Waves is visually and sonically hyperactive from the word go – handheld camerawork, percussive editing, a score from specialists in strong-arming movie music (Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross). Is the combination of these things meant to reflect Tyler’s non-stop, work-hard-play-hard life? You’d like to think so; you therefore give Shults’s too-conspicuous direction the benefit of the doubt. Not for long, though. When Tyler is thrown onto his shoulder in a wrestling match, the damage is irreparable. His world starts to unravel yet the flash and tempo of the narrative are unchanged.
It takes a while but Shults then piles on enough melodramatic events for the story to match the hectic overdrive of the telling of it. Alexis discovers she’s pregnant. She and Tyler go to an abortion clinic, where Alexis is unnerved by pro-life demonstrators and can’t go through with the termination. She decides to keep the baby and, because Tyler refuses to accept this, breaks up with him. He turns to drugs and heavy drinking. On the night of a high-school dance, Tyler turns up there drunk, sees Alexis being photographed with another boy, and confronts her. She explains the boy concerned is a childhood friend and gay but she fails to pacify Tyler. Their argument gets physical. He knocks Alexis to the ground. She hits her head on the concrete floor and dies.
Ronald and Catherine are in the audience when Tyler suffers the fateful wrestling injury. The next time they watch him at a public event is in court, where Tyler receives a life sentence for second-degree murder (with the possibility of parole after thirty years). At the wrestling match, it’s (oddly) Catherine, rather than a member of school or medical staff, who takes charge and cradles the stricken Tyler in her arms. From this point on, until the evening that ends with Tyler killing Alexis, the parents are absent from the film. In other words, there’s no indication of how the demanding Ronald, in particular, has reacted to the consequences of his son’s injury. Have Ronald and/or Catherine sought to console and counsel Tyler, or find someone else to do so? Have they noticed, before the night of the high-school dance, that Tyler’s habits have changed or that he’s no longer seeing Alexis?
The trio has evidently had words of some kind – when Tyler tries to leave the house to go the dance, Catherine reminds him he’s grounded – but we’ve no idea beyond that of how the parents are feeling. Shults’s ignoring this is frustrating in light of the family dynamic he illustrated in the early stages but it’s entirely symptomatic of his real priority in Waves. Tyler’s response to being told he’s grounded is to remind Catherine he’s eighteen and that she’s only his stepmother (a revelation, unless I missed it in earlier dialogue) and a ‘condescending bitch’. When Ronald intervenes, Tyler floors him with a punch. The moment is effective in suggesting a decisive shift in the balance of power between father and son, and anticipating the lethal blow Tyler will strike once he gets to the dance. It’s also a good example of Shults’s essential approach. He’s after instant, shallow impact, masquerading as emotional truth.
Once Tyler goes inside, he disappears from Waves, along with Shults’s interest in him. Instant impact again: the sudden removal of the dominant character startles the viewer but jettisoning Tyler reflects nothing more than the film’s superficiality (though it’s a relief to be spared what would likely have been the clichés of his remorseful life behind bars). Up to this point, Emily has been a quietly engaging presence in the story. That, at least, is good forward planning by Shults for her taking over from her brother as the focus of attention. As that happens, the movie’s hyperkinetic style starts to ease off, though Shults keeps on deflecting attention from people to art-for-art’s-sake image-making (the often striking cinematography is by Drew Daniels).
Emily’s developing relationship with Luke (Lucas Hedges), who was glimpsed briefly early on as a lesser light of the wrestling team, is the best part of Waves and the first scene between emotionally fine-tuned Taylor Russell and Lucas Hedges a particular highlight. Hedges is truthful and funny in capturing Luke’s awkwardness. Trying to summon up the nerve to ask Emily out, he keeps the conversation going by uttering words like ‘awesome’ and ‘cool’ as a kind of halting incantation. Shults’s simplistic writing means, that, just about as soon as Emily accepts Luke’s invitation, he is magically transformed into a more self-confident person, until they first sleep together – ie until the next opportunity for Luke’s diffidence to have a payoff. But Lucas Hedges doesn’t forget Luke’s original personality, even if the script does.
Although Emily and Luke are a change for the better, Shults’s evasion of the human reality of the situations he creates now becomes even more blatant. Emily’s ostracisation by her high-school peers once Tyler’s gone down is just about plausible. Her father’s and stepmother’s apparent lack of interest in how she’s doing in such challenging circumstances is not. The whole story takes place in a world that hardly includes friends, let alone professional welfare counsellors. The Williamses don’t, for example, know anyone from the church that they regularly attend: they can’t, of course, because such people might get in Shults’s way. The concluding part of Waves is dominated by a road trip that Emily and Luke make to Missouri, at her insistence, to visit Luke’s estranged father (Neal Huff), who’s dying of cancer in a hospital there.
On the drive back to Florida, Luke weeps – in relief that he’s made peace with his father; or regret that he didn’t do so sooner; or gratitude to Emily, who urged him to go to Missouri; or anxiety about what he’ll tell his mother, with whom he lives, that he’s secretly spent time with the man who made her and the child Luke’s life a misery? Perhaps a bit of all these things (as Lucas Hedges is able to suggest) but Shults doesn’t really care. He just wants Luke to have a crying jag. Everyone is given her or his breakdown, which is reliably cathartic. Ronald and Catherine have a row (overheard by Emily) in which she accuses him of putting too much pressure on Tyler and he accuses her of ‘not being there’ for himself and Emily. Ronald cries as he tells Emily how much he loves both her and Tyler. She cries back, expressing her guilt at not trying to stop Tyler going after Alexis at the high-school dance.
Some of these exchanges, like earlier ones between Tyler and Alexis, reek of strenuous improvisation. They converge in a climactic soppy montage of resignation and reconciliation moments. Catherine visits Tyler in jail (though no sign of Ronald), Alexis’s parents (Clifton Collins Jr and Vivi Pineda) make a dignified visit to their daughter’s grave, and so on. When she vanishes from home, Ronald shows unaccustomed interest in what Emily’s up to, sending texts to her. She sends don’t-worry-I’ll-be-back-soon-and-explain-everything replies. She does return but we never learn what her parents think – or even if they know – about her relationship with Luke.
Committed as Kelvin Harrison Jr’s performance is, I spent the first half of Waves wanting less of Tyler and more of Sterling K Brown as his father. The most interesting speech in the film comes early, when Ronald tells his son:
‘We are not afforded the luxury of being average – got to work ten times as hard just to get anywhere. I don’t push you because I want to. I push you because I have to. Do you hear what I’m saying, son?’
By ‘we’, Ronald means African-American. The most exasperating thing about Waves (among many) is that Trey Edward Shults, who is white, squanders the opportunity to explore this anxious, driven, black middle-class mindset – and track the effects on it of what happens to Ronald’s son.
25 January 2020
