Make no mistake: Ain’t Them Bodies Saints will break your heart. Love defines the film’s tender Texan-set tale, sweeping through the bittersweet narrative that picks up where most others end. Allure radiates in its graceful look and feel, manifesting in lyrical beauty and poetic detail. Romance swells in the smart assemblage of styles, paying homage to, yet refashioning its influences. All immerse and beguile with their potency and passion, culminating in a simmering sense of inescapable foreboding.
Of course, a story set as a crime spree comes to its conclusion is instantly shaped for tragedy; so too, one that charts the diverging paths of two gun-happy lovers. Dreamer Bob Muldoon (Casey Affleck, Tower Heist) and pragmatic Ruth Guthrie (Rooney Mara, Side Effects) feel fiercely – for each other and for their bandit way of life – until a shootout with the law separates them. As Bob writes letters to while away his prison sentence, Ruth rears and raises the ultimate product of their affection: their young daughter (newcomers Jacklynn and Kennadie Smith). A grasped escape offers naïve hope for a reunion; however Bob’s whereabouts and Ruth’s well-being soon earn the interest of a lovelorn local deputy (Ben Foster, Contraband).
Transitioning from short filmmaking and feature editing (including Upstream Colour) to his third solo full-length effort, writer/director David Lowery (Lullaby, St Nick) is unafraid of embracing the ephemeral in his devastating, delicate film. His reluctant script and refined neo-western style combine to craft a testament to the fleeting and futile, as almost everything proves destined to wilt. Momentum springs from the few persistent elements in the midst of waning warmth; indeed, permanence among fading fortunes is at the feature’s core.
Emotionally, the compulsive connection between the fated protagonists is maintained through scrawled letters and whispered, passed-on messages; visually, the honey-dripped imagery from Bradford Young’s (Pariah) roving lens is a restrained flurry of colour, mood and movement; acoustically, the rousing notes of Daniel Hart’s score are generously haunting.
Yet, even with the meticulously-paced, richly-textured film’s evident resemblance – both in the context-setting content and continuously splendorous aesthetics – to Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints remains informed by the familiar but devoid of formula. The wrongdoings so crucial to the narrative cast a perpetual shadow but are never seen, nor are the jailbreak or any fast-paced police pursuits. Instead the film eschews crime clichés and deconstructs outlaw archetypes to value expression, idealism and romanticism over convention, its tale as much a disconcerting dream of impressionism as a chronicle of an intense union.
Lowery’s auteurial voice, boldly announcing its arrival, makes the feature a statement; however the film’s precise performances, subverting the expected whilst conjuring compelling characters, convey its true meaning. Affleck, last given a meaty lead role in The Killer Inside Me, turns sensitive nuance into a gift; Mara externalises the film’s palpable pain with grounded elegance and resigned acceptance; Foster, as the understated third side of their enigmatic love triangle, perfectly embodies calm in the face of seething turmoil. Theirs are perceptive, probing efforts, astutely and subtly synchronised with the surrounding feature. There can be no happy endings but for the audience, treated to a feat of filmmaking as brazenly ambitious as it is evocatively realised.
Ain’t Them Bodies Saints will break your heart, but it will also win your allegiance.
Rating: 4 ½ stars out of 5
Ain’t Them Bodies Saints
Director: David Lowery
USA, 2013, 105 mins
Melbourne International Film Festival
25 July – 12 August
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