★★★★☆
10 February 2018
A movie review of YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE. |
“I want you to hurt them,” Senator Votto (Alex Manette)
A nightmare unfolds. Time bleeds. Violence without catharsis. Director Lynne Ramsay has made a throwback to 1970s moviemaking and put a fresh spin. (Not that those type of movies ever get tired.) Think a modern CHINATOWN (1974). A society rotting to its core. Previously unchecked appetites of the powerful meet head on a resourceful protagonist. Like SERPICO (1973), the odds are stacked against him. As with GET CARTER (1971), the lead cuts a swathe through the depraved.
A nightmare unfolds. Time bleeds. Violence without catharsis. Director Lynne Ramsay has made a throwback to 1970s moviemaking and put a fresh spin. (Not that those type of movies ever get tired.) Think a modern CHINATOWN (1974). A society rotting to its core. Previously unchecked appetites of the powerful meet head on a resourceful protagonist. Like SERPICO (1973), the odds are stacked against him. As with GET CARTER (1971), the lead cuts a swathe through the depraved.
YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE is not revenge porn. Ferocity mostly unfolds just out of frame. There is no relief for the segment of an audience baying for blood. Society’s current malaise cannot be healed with Rambo heroics. A one-man army can rescue individuals, but the population needs to save itself with a reappraisal. I think about this Primo Levi quote a lot, “A country is considered the more civilised the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak and a powerful one too powerful.”
With each new film director Lynne Ramsay builds on the technical accomplishment of the last. And she hasn't dropped the ball yet. Opening on him clearing up a hotel room, we wonder who is Joe (Joaquin Phoenix). Is this the perpetrator of a heinous crime? It is revealed he is some kind of fixer. Not George Clooney in MICHAEL CLAYTON (2007). He is some kind of private eye cum muscle. Agent/job allocator, John McCleary (John Dorman) has a $50k gig. Senator Votto’s young daughter, Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), has gone missing. Votto wants her found, brought home, and the perpetrators to suffer. He does not want the police involved. That his wife killed herself a few years back suggests an unsettling relationship with women. His position in government hints at an observation of authority.
Do the disjointed flashbacks reflect the mind of Joe? The weight of his past presses on his consciousness. There is suggestion he might have been abused. In blinks of an eye his past is glimpsed. A soldier. Gone to seed at a relatively early age, the things he must have seen. The things he might have done? Sporting a pot belly dad-bod, but he is physically strong. Early on, Joe is shown to be able to take a blow, and then floor an opponent. He is incongruous: Slovenly in appearance yet meticulous. A brutal guy taking care of his mother (Judith Roberts). For a lead, he is refreshingly out of shape. Yet, he has the skill set to be a hitman.
YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE continually goes against the grain. Normally one craves such. Though, here the movie is so well crafted and Joaquin Phoenix so compelling, you secretly want traditional genre thrills. You don’t get it. You get something different. Something maybe you didn’t know you wanted. Even when a hit-team is in his house, his response to a dying antagonist is strangely compassionate. We are on this Earth so fleetingly, is that what the enigmatic title is referring to?
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