Scottish director Lynne Ramsay is the textbook definition of
quality over quantity. In her nearly twenty-year career, she’s only released
four feature-length films: Ratcatcher,
Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk About Kevin, and today’s subject, You Were Never Really Here. Due to
various industry gatekeeping (read: sexism), she’s often been labeled as “difficult”.
If she were a man, her reputation would be “perfectionist”. But I’m just going
to call her what she really is: genius. While her discography is small, each
one is a devastating deep dive into the darkness of the human soul, and a case study
of the old film adage “Show, don’t tell.” (Every Frame A Painting
explains it way better than I ever could.) You Were Never Really Here, based on the novella by Jonathan Ames,
is a lean cut of beef that conveys a lot by showing little, clocking in at just
under 90 minutes and not wasting a single second.
Our story follows Joe (Joaquin Phoenix), a troubled war
veteran and former FBI agent who lives with his ailing mother (Judith Roberts) and
works as a hitman. His specialty: rescuing girls from human traffickers. His
weapon of choice: a ball peen hammer. His capacity for violence: high. He’s
enlisted by a New York senator (Alex Manette) to find his missing daughter
(Ekatarina Samsonov) and hurt her kidnappers. But when the job goes awry, Joe must
tango with shifty middle-men, on-the-take cops, and a twisted conspiracy that
goes all the way to the top.
When I say this movie shows and tells, I really mean it. One
of Lynne Ramsay’s many talents as a filmmaker is her ability to imbue the
audience with a well of information with just a single image, even one that’s
only there for a split second. The meat of the plot is delving into our
protagonists fractured psyche, wrought with memories of past traumas, held
together with gossamer threads. The opening shot of him asphyxiating himself
with a plastic bag speaks volumes. A quick match-cut of him doing the same
thing as kid in the closet while someone screams in the other room says more. That
powerful suggestion extends to the action. You
Were Never Really Here is a prime example of what I like to call “subtle
brutality”. While there is plenty of violence, rarely is it shown upfront,
leaving us to only witness the bloody aftermath. And when it is shown, it’s
done in a very indirect manner. A shining example of this is when Joe raids a
brothel and brute-forces his way through the halls Taxi Driver style with nothing but a hammer, but they’re shot in
silence through the building’s security cameras with the sound of bones
breaking and bodies hitting the floor overtaken by a cheery oldie.
With this being a story of a mentally unstable ex-military
man determined to save a teenage girl from New Your pimps, the Taxi Driver comparisons are inevitable.
But make no mistake, Joe is no Travis Bickle. In fact, I’d argue that Joe is
the fully realized version of the hero that Travis saw himself as. Joaquin
Phoenix, with his bushy beard and lumbering figure decorated in scars is a
towering presence. One who speaks softly if he speaks at all (you could fit all
his lines on an index card) and is gentle with those he cares about, showing
tenderness when he’s alone with his mother or the senator’s daughter, but won’t
hesitate to bring the pain when the job calls for it. But it’s not Joe’s outer
turmoil that Ramsay is interested in, but rather is internal. Joe is a man with
a head full of demons constantly jabbing his brain with red hot pokers. Moments
of quiet are periodically interrupted with short, sudden flashbacks of trauma
from his childhood or his time on the field of duty. These demons often attack
in quick bursts, leaving us with a single image that gives away everything.
That PTSD is externalized when we switch to Joe’s point of view. The narrow
tight shots and sound mixing zeroing in on certain background noise gives the feeling
of being on the verge of a stroke or a migraine. Deafening. Discombobulated. Distorted.
The film is broken up with a few quiet moments and subtle
humor that help break up the tension. I’ve mentioned the scenes where Joe is
just alone with his mother or the brief period of relief after he rescues the
senator’s daughter, and it’s within these women whose trauma he shares that he
finds his motivation. It’s like a reversal of the film splicing scene in Fight Club. Between scenes of smashing a
man’s hands like tenderized porkchops and flashbacks of a kid getting shot over
a candy bar, we see a guy polishing silverware with his mom and cleaning out
her fridge, or two guys randomly lying on the floor and singing a cheesy pop
song together. Granted, both guys are covered in blood during that latter
scene, but it breaks things up nonetheless.
Bottom line, You Were
Never Really Here is an elegantly blunt instrument of a film. Lynne Ramsay
took a blood-soaked hammer, flung it at a blank canvas, framed it and brought
her splatter piece out on display. It’s a haunting portrait of a man saving a
girl from going down his own path, even though she may be too far down to turn
back. But there’s a sickening thrill in watching him try.
8/10
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