You Were Never Really Here

Hammer & Bickle

You Were Never Really Here
2018 UK/France/USA Directed by Lynne Ramsay
UK cinema release print.

Warning: In order for me to talk about a couple of scenes in the way I want to talk about them, it’s necessary to have spoilers here, including the ending of the movie. Please go see the movie before you read my thoughts on it.

Based on the novella by Jonathan Ames, You Were Never Really Here is Lynne Ramsay’s fourth feature length film. It stars Joaquin Phoenix, an actor I’ve never really appreciated until his star turn here, as the title character Joe. Joe takes on brutal, illegal jobs rescuing children from pedophiles for cash... always carrying a trusty hammer to smash his way through people to reach his goal. So, yeah, pretty much a hit man with a conscience. If you understand my title for this piece, you’ll know I’ll soon be making the much noted comparison of this movie to a rather more famous film of the 1970s and I know, already, people are getting sick of hearing this comparison from other commentators on the film. However, like I said, I will get to this in a minute because, frankly, Ramsay seems to be doing everything she can in the movie to invite this response and... she does a fine job with it too.

Now, I usually stay away from films featuring Phoenix if I can but when I saw the trailer for this I was intrigued and, frankly, when I saw who the director was then I knew that I would have to see this one. Including this movie, I’ve only seen three of Ramsay’s four feature films and her last one, We Really Need To Talk About Kevin, really didn’t do much for me, truth be told. However, anyone who directed the absolutely astonishing movie version of Morvern Callar, which I found much more interesting than the book (the book isn’t bad, mind you, but the characters seem pitched a little differently), is someone who has my trust for life.

As it happens, You Were Never Really Here is a truly great movie. There are times when it becomes an almost hypnagogic experience due to the way the images and the stark musical score by Jonny Greenwood work together, too.

After establishing the main character Joe by way of showing us the end and aftermath of a ‘previous job’ and then showing us his loving relationship with his ageing mother, who he lives with, the film drifts fairly rapidly into the main plot set up... where Joe is asked by a senator to rescue his daughter from a child prostitution ring... which is something which is a vast simplification in terms of the political damage the exposure of such a ring could do, it turns out. We follow his mission to rescue young Nina, played brilliantly by Ekaterina Samsonov and then, as Joe waits to deliver her back into the hands of her father, everything goes wrong for Joe and Nina. Joe barely manages to escape with his life. When he returns to his familiar places, everyone he knows has been tortured and killed in an effort to find him, including his mother. Joes mission now becomes to once more rescue Nina from the clutches of the politically powerful, child slave swapping ring that have created this situation in the first place.

And it’s drawn a lot of comparisons to Taxi Driver and... I really can’t disagree with that slant.

Joe’s similarity, in some ways, to "God’s lonely man" Travis Bickle and Nina’s dead-eyed version of Jodie Foster’s Iris are things I don’t think I imagined as the writer/director seems to be almost pushing these similarities on us. The visual metaphors of the streets of New York where Joe drives his car in an almost direct parody of the shots and lightning of DeNiro’s cab driving scenes in Taxi Driver can’t, I’m sure, be anything but deliberate. The seedy apartment building where Joe first rescues Nina could easily be the same building where Travis Bickle makes his final stand to rescue Iris in Scorcese’s phenomenal classic and the distancing that Scorcese achieves in some of that last shoot out (with voyeuristic, overhead shots etc) are mimicked here but in a completely different way. The film is violent in intent but, actually, not that violent in what it shows... you feel it more with the gut crunching sound design and the juxtaposition of visual information rather than see most of the violence and the way Ramsay chooses to show that first big rescue is on perpetually cycling Close Circuit Television screens as we track Joe’s progress through the pedophile's lair via media within media.

Other parallels with Taxi Driver would include the diner where Joe and Nina drink their milkshakes at the end of the movie and there’s even, during that 'New York by night' drive-by sequence, that shot where the camera focuses on what’s outside the front windscreen before shifting so the rear view mirror comes into sharp focus.

So, yeah, I can’t really blame people for talking about the Scorcese movie in relation to this one. It even, in some ways, seems to have the same plot as Scorcese’s noted influence on his version. That being that of the central story of John Ford’s The Searchers, where Nina takes on the motivation associated with the Natalie Wood role in that film.

One of the other influences which I think some people are maybe missing (or maybe it’s just me seeing what I want to see), is that of the cinema of Sergio Leone. In a lot (not quite all) of Leone’s cinema, we have the characters (and audience) being constantly informed and updated by memory flashbacks to a back story outside the current one and this is what Ramsay does with Joe’s character so that, by the end, we have an understanding and sympathy with the character as his own childhood trauma is made accessible to us. Ramsay is also exceptionally clever here because those little flashes of memory kind of creep up on us almost unannounced in a lot of instances and she does this, I believe, by showing us lots of random details in little flashes in a similar way. For instance, we might see a floor polisher suddenly filling the screen for a few seconds or Joe’s mouth at a water fountain. These little cut aways make the other cutaways to Joe’s turbulent past and his obsession with breath play and constant contemplation and fascination with suicide a more palatable and easy thing to accept in the general flow of information as this gem unfolds.

There are some really great moments here, too, which are real flashes of the Ramsay genius and I think my favourite of these is the moment where Joe buries his mother in a lake and weighs his pockets down with rocks too... in a bid to bury himself with her. As we see Joe and the black plastic bag that holds his mum float down to the bottom of the lake, we hear Joe counting in his head on the soundtrack... counting down to his own death, We are then instantly reminded of Nina’s countdown to something on the soundtrack earlier in the film and when Joe opens his eyes at the realisation that he really has to go rescue her again, we see Nina swimming up from the bottom of the lake in Joe’s mind too, as he liberates himself from the water which seemed to be the answer to his obvious death wish.

Now, the ending of the movie is brilliant but I’ve seen some people saying that it competely changes the perception of everything that happens before it. Now, maybe I’m just exceptionally slow or stupid but... I beg to differ. And this really is a big spoiler here folks so, you know, look away and go off and see the movie instead, if you haven’t already done so...

When Nina goes off to a restroom in the diner, Joe takes a revolver and blows his own brains out on the table. Everybody else around him carries on like normal and the blood spattered waitress even plonks his bill down on the table in the big pool of red fluid forming and we realise that he is just imaging this, as Nina returns and wakes him from his revelry. Now, some people are taking this and the prominence of pills he pops to try and keep his haunting childhood memories at bay as testament that none of the things in the movie actually happened and that it was all in his head. I don’t think so... I think this is a natural progression for the two characters and everything did, indeed, happen as we saw it. And besides... Joe still has that big hole in his cheek where he was shot through the face earlier in the movie. So.. a great ending yes but, game changing? No.

And that’s all I have to say about this one. Like Morvern Callar before it, Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here is an absolute classic of modern cinema and the blatant references to Taxi Driver (which only affect the reading if you’ve seen the earlier movie and are frankly not impactful on the story) in no way hinder the movie... they just indicate a confident director’s acknowledgment of cinematic history within the context of her own movie. A true masterpiece and one which I hope sees her getting a lot of recognition and well deserved praise.

Oh... and for the record... Joaquin Phoenix is absolutely brilliant in this.

We Need To Talk About Kevin

Straight N’ Arrow

We Need To Talk About Kevin 2011 UK/USA

Directed by Lynne Ramsay

Screening at UK cinemas.

Warning: There are kind of spoilers here I guess...

although it’s pretty much all worn on it’s sleeve

from the start of the movie.

I didn’t really know much about the latest Lynne Ramsay movie, other than it had an unpleasing (to my ear) and unwieldy title and, consequently, I didn’t really know what to expect from it. My expectations hadn’t changed any after having seen the trailer either. Somebody had said, after also having seen the same trailer, that they assumed it was about some kind of devil-child like in The Omen movies. I couldn’t myself disagree with them entirely because, in many ways, the trailer was was cut like a horror movie, to some extent.

As you've probably guessed by now... I’ve not read the novel on which We Need To Talk About Kevin is based and any reference to the rather grim actions of the title character in the trailer were oblique at best. What I did know, however, is that it was directed by Lynne Ramsay, it’s her third feature length film and that I’d seen her last film, Morvern Callar, and thought it one of the most extraordinary films of that year. So, on the strength of Morvern Callar and the fact that one of the more artistically reliable actresses of contemporary cinema, Tilda Swinton, had a major role in it... I thought it best not to miss this one and I braved London as the times of the single daily screening at my local cineplex were preposterous, and watched it at a time better suited to the needs of the average cinema going public.

I was pretty sure, on the strength of her last feature, that We Need To Talk About Kevin would highlight a solid artist of the cinema directing a work which would demonstrate impeccable taste, great cinematography and a cast capable of giving some of the best performances in current cinema... and I was right. We Need To Talk About Kevin does all that and more. But for me, there were a few little negatives in their which kind of balanced out the movie so it became a little less than jaw dropping on this occasion.

The story, if the movie can be said to have one (as much as this director could be said to deal with such a locked in sequence of events that could make up such a thing as “a story”), is about Kevin’s mum Eva (played by Tilda Swinton) as she looks back over periods of her life of trying to raise an extremely difficult, hostile child, in the aftermath of a high school slaughter in which Kevin has taken a bow and quiver full of arrows and maimed and killed, not only all his classmates but also his father (played by the always fantastic John C. Reilly) and his little sister.

Eva, aggressively ostracised and terrorised by her local community in the wake of her son’s murder spree, now inhabits a world of red where the red paint from her vandalised house and car (which she is forever scrubbing away) is a constant visual metaphor for the blood on her son’s hands. The film is cut in a slightly less than linear way as visual or aural signals trigger her memory and jolt us back to different parts of her life. This kind of technique to give the viewer a slow sense of everything developing at once, like an old self developing polaroid picture will slowly fade into being all at once rather than bit by bit, coupled with the use in this film of large amounts of red, made me think of the closeness of style between Lynne Ramsey in this movie and another of my old directing heroes, Nicholas Roeg. Although Roeg’s sudden flash-back or indeed flash-forward cuts will often be a lot more dramatic in speed and intensity throughout the majority of his movies, the technique is very similar with Ramsay being, perhaps, a more laid back version of Roeg. Laid back in terms of the speed of the contrast, if you will, but not necessarily laid back in terms of dramatic gravitas, it has to be said.

One thing Ramsay seemed to be doing, and I didn’t notice this until a good two thirds of the way through the film but I suspect it holds true for the majority of the running time, is to pitch static shots against hand-held camera shots when the camera does need to move. For example, think of the cinema of Ozu where a scene is comprised of shots from locked down cameras with no motion from the apparatus involved at all... although in this movie there are certainly some of those static shots which have a lot of movement going on within the frame of the shot and which, on one memorable occasion, may trick your eye into thinking the camera is moving. This shot after shot after shot gatling gun technique creates a little jolt on the subconscious when immediately followed by a jerky, hand held shot as a character is being followed around by the cameraman and this kind of dynamism created by the juxtaposition of image types obviously gives the film a lively pacing to it which kind of seeps into you without really calling attention to itself. This is, of course, more evidence to support Ramsay’s genius as an artist of the moving image.

For me, though, there were a few things about the movie that made the final version much less than the sum of its parts, even though the thing taken as a whole was surely not a visual treat that was, in any way, uneasy to digest.

First of all, the film is being promoted with a quote implying that this is Tilda Swinton’s finest performance. Well it may be or it may not be but I don't think one could categorically say that this performance is in any way better than several of her others. And this is not to derogatise or diminish Swinton’s presence in this movie... I’ve certainly made it no secret in the past that I consider Tilda to be one of the most interesting on-screen personalities in many years and the quality of her work in this particular movie is as astonishing as some of her previous roles. It is, though, very much an ensemble piece with John C. Reilly giving good support and some absolutely amazing performances by the various actors playing Kevin at different stages of his life... you will have absolutely no sympathy for this character in any way, shape or form and his totally evil nature will grab ahold of you and not let you go.

My main problem with the movie, though, is that it never really gets grim enough for my liking. Here we are dealing with a terrible subject and a character who is all but going to pieces as she tries to cope with holding everything together... and yet we never really see that inner turmoil unleashed as something tangible on screen and nor do we see the actual events in question as they played out... only the reactions of those around the events. Now I’m not stupid (well, not completely), I realise that this muffled visual expression is designed to keep the tension just this side of the watched kettle never quite boiling and I know the actual events of the high school slaughter are designed to be more enhanced due to the audiences own imagination... and that kind of stuff usually works really well for me in that the implied narrative event will often be much more enhanced than the actual visual realisation of it. However, on this one I just needed more bleak and gloomy and ultimately the film didn’t quite measure up to my own expectations created by the set up of the films opening. But, frankly, that’s my own problem and not something a prospective viewer should worry about when going in to see this movie for the first time.

So... when we come down to it, what we really have is this. We Need To Talk About Kevin is not a film I could watch again like I could with Morvern Callar (which I’d be happy to watch at least once a year) but I’d still have to recommend it on the grounds that, despite the baggage I personally brought with me when I turned up at the cinema to watch this film... it’s still also everything I’d assumed it would be which was, to quote myself from above, a film made by “a solid artist of the cinema directing a work which would demonstrate impeccable taste, great cinematography and a cast capable of giving some of the best performances in current cinema”... so I was right all along, there’s absolutely no point in missing out on this one. Catch it before people start talking about things other than Kevin.