Realism & Romance and Ain't Them Bodies Saints

Bob Muldoon (Casey Affleck) has just broken out of prison and made the perilous journey home to Meridian, Texas. There he hides out with his pal Sweetie (Nate Parker). It’s late at night, they crack a couple cold ones and sit down at a dusty wooden table.

Sweetie: "So how'd you do it?"
Bob: "What, get out? I just started walking. Like I said I would."
Sweetie: "You just walked out?"
Bob: "Yup."
Sweetie: "How does that work?"
Bob: "Well, you know the guards come by your cell every night. They'd say 'lights out' and rattle bars with their sticks. This one guard, he always used to joke and carry on with us. And one night I said, 'Well, I won't be seeing you much longer. Figure I'll be outta here in about ten days.' He said, 'How you gonna do it?' I said, 'I'll just walk right out the door.' He said they'd stop me. I said, 'No, sir. I've got better things to do.' He said, 'That's not how it works.' I said, 'It only works that way because you think it has to. See, I've got a higher calling. I've got a wife and a little girl who needs her daddy.' Then he asked what did I know about a higher calling. He said I'd have to answer to God and the devil for the things I done. I tell him, 'Sir, I used to the devil. And now I'm just a man. As the days tick by, ten, nine, eight, and on the last day, the bars open up, and I'm gonna walk right out.'"

Pause.

Sweetie: "They said you jumped off a work truck."
Bob: "Yeah. Well."

Even without seeing the film, the intent of this particular exchange is likely clear – Bob reciting a tall tale and the curiously named Sweetie quickly calling it as the tall tale it is. And within this sequence, the entire ethos of “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” is brought to the forefront, a clashing of ideals in the slow sweaty night. “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” opens with a title card that simply avows “This Was In Texas.” When in Texas? We don’t really know, the film never explicitly says. Reviews, like Andrew O’Hehir’s, cite the mid-70’s, and while I suppose technology and costuming line up with this assertion, the technical setting seems more like an aesthetic choice. As O’Hehir also notes, the film is very much meant to evoke Terrence Malick’s “Badlands”, and “Badlands” was very much meant to evoke the Starkweather/Fugate murders of the late 50’s, and so even if “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” is set in the 70’s, it sorta feels more like the 50’s. Yet, at the same time, it feels like a movie that’s seen “Badlands.” There is undoubtedly a certain cinematic style it strives to emulate, and because we can feel this emulation, we can also feel the film’s modernity.

Consider the song that plays over the above exchange. It comes across soulfully old school, like one of those uber-deep cuts you’d find on a compilations record. I could hardly fathom I’d never heard it, and after the film I went searching for it. Lo and behold, it’s a modern-day track, sung by an Andrew Tinker with whom I am entirely unfamiliar, near as I can tell recorded strictly for the film. In other words, “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” is both classical and modern, and it blurs those lines repeatedly, taking a tall tale - as old as Odysseus striking for Ithaca, as new as Nicole Kidman waiting on Cold Mountain - and undercutting it with doses of sensibility. Nowhere is this more evident than in the character of Ruth (Rooney Mara), a wife to Bob but a mother to her child. She feels love for Bob and the hope that he will come and spirit them away, and that is the mark of a romantic. She feels love for her daughter and knows that a fugitive, even if it’s the father, entering her daughter’s life would only invite trouble, and that is the mark of a realist. And the film is pitched in the no-man’s-land between these ideals, in the rumbling, the push and pull of Ruth’s soul. And I suppose this is why the film so strongly appeals to me - because I am a romantic constantly feeling the pull of reality.

Skerritt (Keith Carradine) is a local shopowner who took in Bob and Ruth and basically raised them. He wants to protect Ruth by keeping Bob away, even if he seems to know full well that no matter how much he tries to keep Bob away, he can’t necessarily ensure Ruth’s protection. (A push/pull of its own.) He hires a gang of three to deal with Bob and they show up at his shop. One of them ogles an old-time pistol and wonders what the placard next to it is all about. Skerritt explains it’s a list of all the men who have met their end at the barrel of that pistol. “Sounds like bullshit to me,” the guy says. “Yeah,” Skerritt says, “it probably is.” But you can’t tell he doesn’t really believe it’s bullshit. I don’t really believe it’s bullshit either.

My Favorite Movie Shot Of 2013

When director David Lowery was asked what the title of his 2013 feature film “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” meant, he offered the following reply: “It means that everyone, no matter who they are or what they have done, has the potential to be a good person.” I like this response not merely because I appreciate the message, but because he chose the title “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” to illustrate that message rather than a title that went something like “Good Person.” This is to say, the DNA of “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” knows that it is never as cut and dried as simply being a good person – no, life is too emotional and far too complicated for such reductive nonsense.

“Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” turns on the plight of Ruth Guthrie (Rooney Mara), a young single mother to a daughter whose father, Bob Muldoon (Casey Affleck), is locked away in prison, taking the rap for crimes committed by both he and Ruth. So on account of circumstance, Ruth gives up her wayward lifestyle to give all her love to the little one and retires her romantic yearning for Bob. The film’s ardent undercurrent, however, makes us wonder whether or not Ruth really has retired that yearning, or merely repressed it. This question is brought to bear when Bob busts out of prison. Naturally everyone asks Ruth if she thinks home is where he’s headed and she keeps saying no but we keep wondering. Not if he is coming home, mind you, because if fatalism has taught us anything it is that Bob is totally coming home, but if Ruth wants him to come home.

Eventually Bob pens a letter. A stranger covertly delivers it to Ruth. She takes the letter to her porch. She reads it. It tells us what we knew and what Ruth, in those moments when she was honest with herself knew too – Bob is coming home and intends to take Ruth and his daughter away. She finishes the letter. She looks up and to her right.

This is my favorite shot of the year.

It is my favorite shot of the year because of the way cinematographer Bradford Young frames it, with Mara’s dangling hair framing her face, but much more than that it is my favorite shot of the year because the shot is hers as much as ours - more hers than ours. She looks not up, toward the camera, sharing it with us, but away, to the right, keeping it for herself, maintaining a sense of privacy. That’s a rare thing to genuinely witness in the movies – a character’s private thoughts. So often at the movies the audience is allowed intimate and omniscient access, to see everything, because just like life we want to know everything. But in life, we don’t know everything. The more life I live, the more I realize I don’t have much of a handle on life at all. It is a mystery – a beautiful, frustrating mystery, insistently re-forming itself so that even our own thoughts and feelings can become mysteries to ourselves.

That is what this shot implicitly captures, and the more I consider it the more I realize I have no idea what Ruth is thinking in that moment. But I don’t know what she’s thinking in that moment specifically because I think she’s thinking everything – she’s thinking yes and no and please come and please stay away and I-Love-You-So-Much-I-Can’t-Live-Without-You and I-Love-You-So-Much-I-Can-Let-Myself-Live-Without-You.

The characters of “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” are established by their essence and ultimately defined by their decisions. Each of those decisions carries immense weight, and none of those decisions are clear-cut nor easily made, if they are even made at all. We know what we should do. We know what we want to do. But, what do we do?

What do we do?

My Favorite Movie-going Experience Of 2013

Perhaps problematically, I have often viewed the physical act of going to the movies as akin to a church-going experience, the theater itself my sanctuary, The Evangelical AMC River East 21. Church, however, while capable of containing vast reaches of emotion, is typically a more solemn affair……well, at least if you grew up Lutheran. The Liturgy, the Sacrament, even the fellowship (“peace be with you”) was more restrained than joyous. And a movie-going experience – that is, the best kind of movie-going experience – is not solemn. At least, not internally. Internally the best kind of movie-going experience is the banggerreng, the “knock ‘em down storm season” in the language of the Australian aborigines.

Last year at the very end of my Oscar ceremony live log post, I mentioned how the best part of each and every movie-going year is never knowing precisely what film will hit you most in any given year except that it’s very nearly never a film remotely close to the one(s) you expect. Like clockwork, 2013 proved the rule. Oh, I was intrigued by David Lowery’s “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints”, much like I am intrigued by all manner of films each and every year which is why I go see so many, but it was not even one of the three or four dozen I was most anticipating. This was late August, nearly the end of August, the end of a long, hot and generally awful summer that marked my first foray back to school in years and years (reader's note: I really do not care for school). In fact, that very sweaty, sticky day had marked my concluding final, and so I decided to toast my good riddance to it in my favorite way - going to the movies.

On the walk I'm entirely certain I noticed the ominously dark clouds rolling in from the west, but I'm not entirely certain their presence registered. After all, it was, like, 250 degrees. My mind was kaput. So I bought my ticket and found my seat and said a hail mary for the theater's air conditioning (not really) and the lights went down and the projector whirred and onto the screen came "Ain't Them Bodies Saints" and I swiftly entered my mental magical kingdom. Gone With The Cinema. On the outside I sat quietly and attentively, wholly invested, but I kept welling up, again and again, at lines and line readings and reactions and shots and developments. Inside, I was overwhelmed, my heart pounding, a whirlybird of emotion.

This is why I found it so appropriate when I heard the first crack of thunder. At first I assumed it must be emanating from the screen. Then I noted the scene presently unfolding was set in the sunlight. Then it thundered again and I realized the storm I had glimpsed roughly forty-five minutes earlier had arrived. Did it ever. Thunder rolled and lightning cracked and torrents of rain and hail pounded against the roof of the rickety old theater where I sat. There were maybe seventeen other people watching with me and several seemed annoyed by this meteorological development. "Ain't Them Bodies Saints" can be a quiet, contemplative film, and a raucous thunderstorm does not pair well with it.

Yet, it did. For me, anyway, since the storm mirrored the exuberant tempest coursing through my insides. It was a strange moment - I'm never taken out of my favorite movies and I'd been taken out of this one. Except, upon further review, I was not really taken out of it at all. The banggerreng in my heart mirrored the banggerreng in the sky, and for a few minutes the whole world and I were singing in harmony.

Ain't Them Bodies Saints

With its 1950's-era characters playing pen pal via romanticized voiceover and any number of painterly shots of the Texas plains, writer/director David Lowery's "Ain't Them Bodies Saints" will invite obvious and not necessarily incorrect comparisons to Terrence Malick. Even so, Lowery's film forges its own path, utilizing an elemental story that gracefully allows its underlying themes and larger points to emerge on their own sweet time. The story is so simple, but its substance is ultimately never-ending.

Opening with an I'm Pregnant Reveal the script quickly, purposely turns the Reveal on its head, pulling the curtain all the way back to show our lovebirds, Bob (Casey Affleck) and Ruth (Rooney Mara), as vaguely defined Bonnie and Clyde-esque bandits. Alas, a job goes awry, Ruth shoots a local deputy, Bob takes the fall, and is squired, shackled and drawn, off to prison.

This unleashes the first of the film's many impressive achievements, specifically in how it rolls through a handful of years and an abundance of character details without leaving us behind. In only a few scene snippets the entire relationship of Ruth and her daughter Sylvie is convincingly crafted, while in the meantime she and Bob keep the flame burning by exchanging aching letters. Eventually Bob busts out of prison and heads due south, intent on meeting his little girl and re-uniting with his one true love.

This has all the makings of a heightened, yearning fable, a Dust Bowl Inman trying with all his might to get back to Ada and Cold Mountain. And while love is very much on the mind of "Ain't Them Bodies Saints" it's a different exploration of that lasting theme. Does true love outweigh responsibility? Mustn't a mother's love all be given to the child? Is compromised love necessary in the name of familial welfare?

The deputy, the same one Ruth plugged with a bullet way back when, Patrick, harbors a consuming if reticent affection for Ruth and little Sylvie. He comes around the house, checks up on them, spends time with them, buys Sylvie gifts. Played by Ben Foster in a brilliant slow burn of a performance, he makes it clear that he thinks and knows more than he says. The focal issue between the two is raised but not addressed. He has his reasons. So does she.

And so too does Affleck convey a character who understands that his presence as an outlaw in the lives of his wife and daughter would inevitably be problematic, a fact he is explicitly reminded of by the low-rent local crime magnate (Keith Carradine) who makes threats should he fail to heed that reminder. In spite this knowledge, Bob cannot stay away. Love, in this case, may not conquer all, done in by its long odds.

Mara is magnetic in the primary role, a young woman forced to grow old beyond her years, settled down for the sake of her child but still with a glimmer in her sorrowful eyes for the way things were. One scene finds her scolding and shooing neighborhood children from the street for fooling around with a BB gun. As punishment she takes away the gun, only to pause and fire a single shot at no one and nothing. A smile creeps across her face. That old criminal spirt remains intact.

Which is what makes Ruth's Choice so difficult, a pining for her fugitive soulmate and a devotion to her role as mother and caretaker. Patrick may be the right man to help raise his daughter but he may not be the man she loves.

These warring ideas come to a head when she reads a letter secretly delivered to her from Patrick in which he advises of his intention to seek her and his daughter out. Mara's reaction will momentarily still your beating heart. She looks to her right, away from the camera, for it is her decision and hers alone, and perhaps she wishes not to share it.

Nevertheless, her wistful smile tells us all we need to know.

To Movie Poster Makers Everywhere

Wrong...

...Right.