Joaquin Phoenix’s New Thriller Breathes Life Into A Tired Genre

YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE

‘A hammer-wielding hero on a vigilante revenge mission’ sounds like an Oldboy rewrite; and, when that hammer-wielding hero turns out to be Joaquin Phoenix rescuing a sweet blonde girl from the clutches of sex-traffickers, it sounds like an Oldboy rewrite loaded with straightforward, All-American, action-movie morality.

But, Lynne Ramsay’s long-awaited return — her first film since 2011’s We Need To Talk About Kevin, having been booted off the way-troubled Jane Got A Gun in 2013 — is an artful, elusive riff on a tired genre; one which may annoy fans of ultraviolent macho clichés, but will certainly delight anyone who’s up for the cinematic unexpected.

It’s an utter delight to take in; one of those films where the elements — Ramsay’s direction, Thomas Townend’s cinematography, Jonny Greenwood’s score, Paul Davies’ sound design — are on song, working together in harmony. It looks great and sounds incredible; all hyper-saturated colours and discordant electronic noise, playing out in an oft-disorienting sensorial swirl.

This is a stylistic choice in service of a greater theme: You Were Never Really Here not a work of justice or vengeance, but a picture about an action-movie anti-hero’s questionable mindstate and motivations. Phoenix’s ‘cleaner’ is a military vet and sufferer of flashback-witnessed boyhood hardships; each leaving the lingering spectre of PTSD, panic attacks, nightmares, budding paranoia. The narrative isn’t an exercise in an unreliable narrator, more a way of burrowing into his unreliable mind; mise-en-scène, scene-to-scene movement, and fragmentary editing creating a dislocating effect.

The result is a thorough disruption of the usual express-train of rip-roaring revenge. Ramsay even doubles down on that defiance, by deliberately keeping most of the action out of the frame, bad-guys largely offed between edits. The result feels like an unrecognisable, almost alien take on a familiar genre; a high-art art-movie in which all the blood, death, and comeuppance present nothing so pat as satisfaction. Its shocking final scene even draws connections back to We Need To Talk About Kevin, all this ultra-violence a product of the grotesque horrorshow of contemporary America.

THE MISEDUCATION OF CAMERON POST

Conversion therapy can be played for tragedy (Boy Erased) or comedy (But I’m A Cheerleader). Desirée Akhavan’s film lands somewhere in the middle, essentially marking a bittersweet teen-movie, coming-of-age identity-finding found in the face of religious naysayery. It’s set in 1993, a time whose more-conservative, isolated climate proves fecund for ‘conversion’ camps, places where religious families hope for a ‘cure’ to queerness; the power of prayer and All-American can-do Christianity out to beat back the Gay Agenda and set wayward youths on the straight-and-narrow.

The drama looks at this milieu with a sense of bemusement, only occasionally giving rise to righteous anger; as in the moment of defiance where Chloë Grace Moretz charges the whole enterprise with “programming people to hate themselves”. She plays the titular character: a teenager caught, in the opening act, in flagrante with a gal-pal, getting fresh in the backseat of a car outside the homecoming dance. She’s bustled off to God’s Promise, a remote, rural camp populated by all manner of outsiders; these characters, and the cod-psychologising “reasons” for their queerness, introduced via a comic montage in which blame is placed on parents, sports, music, and other forms of ‘gender confusion’ that’ve turned these kids fruity.

There, she finds not punishment, atonement, shame, but a sense of self-belief, moral certitude, and, ultimately, rebellion. When the camp-counsellors — ‘cool’, guitar-strumming John Gallagher, Jr and frosty, forbidding Jennifer Ehle — demand “honesty” from their charges, the hypocrisy of the whole charade lingers all too tellingly. Moretz also finds friends in the form of Sasha Lane and Forrest Goodluck, outsiders amongst the outsiders; their shared bonding the classic, heartwarming staple of on-screen depictions of adolescent self-discovery. In such, The Miseducation Of Cameron Post plays as crowdpleaser, its depiction of on-screen acceptance mirroring the greater cultural acceptance of this less-conservative time. Its final shot is a moment of gloriously-photographed liberation: our trio free, on the wide open road to a better future.

HEARTS BEAT LOUD

At first, Brett Haley’s Hearts Beat Loud plays as some hipster-dad fantasy: a bearded, flannel-shirted, record-store-guy starts a band with his teenaged daughter. He’s raised her a music-snob, but she’s heading off to med-school; so, in their final summer together, their home-recording project is pure father/daughter bonding, undertaken to humour the old man. Thus, we watch Nick Offerman and Kiersey Clemons jam away; and, thankfully, this isn’t a film where celebrity actors mime, rather one where friendly faces actually perform. The depiction of DIY music-making is pleasingly down-to-earth, and a huge part of this crowdpleasin’ pic’s abundant charm.

But, this isn’t just a starting-a-band movie for aging indie-music fans. And it’s not just a portrait of middle-aged angst, of a man hanging onto the totems — and artistic expressions — of his youth in the face of financial burdens, heavy baggage, failed dreams, and many disappointments. Even though, in that, the film feels true. It’s, instead, a two-hander, contrasting adult-male anxieties with adolescent-female coming-of-age. While dad deals with past and frets over future, Clemons is living in a more liminal moment in time; discovering, in both home-spun artistic output and budding Mitski-soundtracked flirtations with Sasha Lane, her sense of self. This means that, Hearts Beat Loud doesn’t just get the music right —‘making it’, now, sure does mean appearing on a hot Spotify playlist— but works as a character study.

JULIET, NAKED

Juliet, Naked is another crowdpleaser with a dad-rock heart. Here, Rose Byrne is stuck in both a small English seaside town and a relationship with Chris O’Dowd; her tweedy, needy, arrested-adolescent beau a pop-cultural scholar whose basement is an obsessive superfan shrine to the invented rock’n’roll saint Tucker Crowe, a cult act who transcended into myth when he walked out on his career and all but disappeared. Until, that is, an old demo of his shows up at their house, and everything changes.

Nick Hornby, who penned the novel on which it is based, is a longtime lover of musical arcana; and, bringing it to screen, director Jess Peretz goes all in on this fictional mythos. Crowe’s supposed classic songs have been penned by Ryan Adams, Conor Oberst, M. Ward, and Robyn Hitchcock. They’re sung by Ethan Hawke, who enters the narrative — and completes an unlikely love-triangle — with a comic smash-cut: this vanished ghost of rock mythos really just some greying shlub in an American supermarket.

From there, what unfolds a non-threatening, pleasingly-downbeat rom-com, with Byrne and Hawke first trading trans-Atlantic emails — like some written riff on the getting-to-know-you haute-philosophical chit-chat of Before Sunrise — then ending up in an unexpected romance; O’Dowd’s aggrieved fanboy forever hovering, comically, on the periphery.

It’s, largely, a film about re-partnering, and dealing with a new love’s past; embodied in the form of the many kids Hawke has scattered throughout his booze-soaked history. Given 2018 has found him being commanding both in front of (First Reformed) and behind (Blaze) camera, it’s no surprise that Hawke wears his part well; giving his rocker a lived-in quality, so soaked with regrets that life can no longer be disappointing. It’s enough to hang a minor film on. And the songs aren’t bad, either.

WON’T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR?

Won’t You Be My Neighbor? feels like parachuting in on someone else’s nostalgia fest. It’s a chronicle of Fred Rogers, the benevolent children’s-show presenter who created, wrote, and performed in the American-kids-TV staple Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood for 33 years. For the US viewers who turned this documentary into an unexpected hit, this film is about a figure central to their childhood’s; for Australian viewers, it’s very likely they’ve never seen a single second of his show.

But, the further Morgan Neville’s pic progresses, the more it moves away from a celebration of shared childhood memories, the more universal it becomes, and the more its trenchant themes arise. It’s a portrait of a nice, caring person who had empathetic, humane values; a film espousing kindness, humility, and the inherent worth of human beings. That sounds, in text, utterly anodyne, but, sadly, in 2018, both the subject and the premise play as radical. In an era of toxic internet discourse, pantomimed outrage, Trump tweets, Milkshake Ducks, and the great clusterfuck of contemporary politics — especially in this country — the idea of ‘basic human decency’ is somehow revelatory.

MCQUEEN

Yes, it’s the obligatory talking-heads-and-archival-footage documentary chronicling the short life of the late English fashion-designer Alexander McQueen. And, here, again, come the big hits and personal failings of a fallen, tragic artist; an incomplete history delivered in two potted hours. But directors Peter Ettedgui and Ian Bonhôte never submit to simple celebration, haute hagiography, or take their subject’s greatness at face value. Instead, as they employ the tools of this very-tired docu-genre, they’re constantly getting at two things: why McQueen was meaningful as an artist, and how he was as a man.

In such, they don’t bring in famous-faces for their mere celebrity, nor have people wax rhapsodic about McQueen’s designs. Instead the talking-heads gathered are McQueen’s family, friends, and former collaborators; those who knew him all too well, and who’re unafraid of recounting this troubled figure in unflattering ways. Ettedgui and Bonhôte shoot them in close-up, as if drilling into their emotions; their testimonies gathering like a dark cloud, the film forever moving towards tragedy.

It’s easy for films like these to romanticise the self-destructive genius, but McQueen never does; romance reserved for the work (oft depicted in montage, soundtracked by great Michael Nyman score). For a made-to-format doc, it’s a film filled with real pain, both in the designer’s life and amongst those he left behind.

BEAST

It’s a tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme: a good-hearted girl from a prim-and-proper fam falls for a rough-and-tumble type from the wrong side of the tracks, due largely to his impressive animalistic scent. She’s a beauty, he’s, um, well, just look at the title. Michael Pearce’s debut poses as yr standard grim-British-miserablist portrait of class liberation and exposed intolerance in an isolated, small-town community. But, really, it’s an artful riff on the intimacy thriller, with all the tawdry passion, salacious revelation, and grand melodrama it suggests.

The film is set, and shot, on Jersey, where Pearce grew up. And, taking influence from the real-life Beast Of Jersey — a “serial sex stalker” who trod the island in the 1960s — this isolated micro-society is, as in many a TV procedural, haunted by a serial-killer targeting young and attractive girls. It’s likely a scarred-up Johnny Flynn, our way-hot Beast in question; thus, our porcelain heroine may be sleeping with a murderer. The thrill! The danger! The eroticism! The final-act showdown! The thinly-drawn characters and generic air! The almost laughable sense of darkness! The worst of all the films reviewed here!

HAPPY AS LAZZARO

Alice Rohrwacher’s magic-realist fable has charmed the festival circut, and this looks likely to continue as it touches down locally at the Italian Film Festival. Its charm is embodied in the form of its titular character, an ever-benevolent, unflappable, unquestioning, fresh-faced chap (played by Adriano Tardiolo) who, for both the audience and the characters herein, is so devoid of deviousness, cunning, and complexity that he becomes a blank slate to project upon: he symbol, servant, saint, doormat, drip, puppydog, or fantasy-husband, depending on your perspective.

The film opens in a nightmarish depiction of the Italian bucolic: a dustbowl tobacco-farm shot in such grainy super-16mm that you’re sure the setting, too, is vintage. Turns out it’s a fairytale hamlet hidden from the modern world, a present-day portal back to a time of social hierarchies and inhuman exploitation; its villagers all subsistence sharecroppers, toiling without reward for a ruling Marchesa, who occasionally blows into town to laze in her crumbling mansion. The lowest rung on the totem-pole is Lazzaro, who’ll eagerly take to the most thankless tasks, not even demanding polite treatment as his reward.

A radical, temporal trick flips the film on its head, mid-way, upping the fable-ish feeling; with Lazzaro suddenly thrust into the contemporary world. In this whole new setting, there’s still hand-to-mouth subsistence and entrenched social strata at work; Rohrwacher’s film essentially, simply, positing that systemic inequality is endemic in Italian society.

DOGMAN

Though he’s best known for his sprawling 2008 crime-saga Gomorrah, Matte Garrone’s films are, usually, studies in obsession; films in which disenfranchised outsiders become destructively fixated on an idea, a standard, or another person. Dogman keeps to that thematic beat; so much so that it can be seen as a sister-picture to his breakout 2002 film The Embalmer. It’s shot in the same sad, surreal, shadowy seaside locale —Castel Volturno in Campania, infamous as mafia stronghold—where apartment-block towers and deserted streets feel like you’re in the last outpost of a Western. And, again, the story riffs on a real-life story in which a small, maligned figure falls in thrall to a big, handsome lunk.

Here, Marcello Fonte plays a nebbish, benevolent dog-groomer; a tiny figure who oft pales in comparison to the gargantuan, aggressive hounds he fusses over. He’s a well-meaning if clueless separated-father, a scuba enthusiast, and part-time local coke dealer. As easy mark, he’s bullied into accompanying local lowlifes on robbery jobs, but never given a fair cut. Chief bully is the coked-up, raging, swollen Edoardo Pesce; a swaggering, idiotic alpha-male who entrances Fonte with his status, but treats him horribly. It’s essentially a portrait of an abusive relationship, Garrone lighting the fuse and waiting, patiently, for that moment with the long-suffering party snaps, turning from victim to vigilante in an instant.

DOMESTIQUE

True to its title, Adam Sedlák’s unnerving debut is a kind of domestic body-horror, a portrait of quotidian obsessions housed in a Prague apartment evermore unmoored from reality. Opening with a quote from Lance Armstrong, no less, Domestique’s main character (Jiří Konvalinka) is a cyclist whose body is a machine; his entire days built around the intake of fuel and the output of energy. With a stationery bike set up inside his home, he almost never leaves it; except when he visits the dark, woody, very-Soviet-feeling offices of his cycling-body overseers. At their prompting, he, of course, gets into blood-doping; his obsessive training routines now involving all manner of science, deception, and plasma.

Said cyclist isn’t alone, though. In a matching his/hers domestic partnership, his wife (Tereza Hofová), is hoping to conceive, and, thus, everything she does, at home, seems geared towards optimising her fertility window: from food, drink, and supplements, to endless thermometer readings and scheduled sex appointments. When the pair end up sleeping, side by side, in an oxygen tent, their home wholly transforms into an absurd circus; Sedlák pushing things further and further, to dark, disturbing ends. Here, the sustained nightmare is one of maniacal self-obsession and the grotesque quest for goal-oriented success, effectively holding up a funhouse mirror to society’s current cult of the individual.