Director: David Lowery.
Starring: Rooney Mara, Casey Affleck, Ben Foster, Keith Carradine.
Running Time: 96 minutes.
Certificate: 15.
Synopsis: Bob Muldoon (Casey Affleck) and Ruth Guthrie (Rooney Mara), an impassioned young outlaw couple on an extended crime spree, are finally apprehended by lawmen after a shootout in the Texas hills. Although Ruth wounds a local officer, Bob takes the blame. Four years later, Bob escapes from prison and sets out to find Ruth and their daughter, born during his incarceration.
His fourth and most distinct feature, David Lowery’s AIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS opens with a particularly indistinct, somewhat timeless title card that reads, “This was in Texas…” Rarely becoming anything less than languid and unassuming, it’s a film that is as beautiful as it is sombre and glacial. Often bringing to mind the work of the oft-mimicked Terrence Malick and the crime dramas of the late, great Robert Altman, it is captured with the freshness of a burgeoning cinematic presence, however subdued Lowery’s voice seems to be.
Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck play Ruth Guthrie and Bob Muldoon in what appears to be a small-town Texas of the 1970s. They are a couple cut very much from the Malickian mould; impassioned, tempestuous lovers who, after pledging their devotion to each other, resolve to finish their necessity for a life of crime with the one final job that will secure a future for themselves and their unborn baby. Events, inevitably, go awry and Bob takes the fall for Ruth after she shoots and wounds Patrick (Ben Foster), a young police officer.
Bob writes incessantly to his beloved from prison, vocalising his unquenchable yearning to break free from his incarceration and be with her and their child. Dividing the film up so as to delineate the intervening period of time, Lowery – who also penned the screenplay – carefully maps the effects of the fateful altercation shared between his two protagonists. As the years progress, Ruth settles down and becomes fully ingrained within a now one-sided relationship with her daughter whilst being slowly cajoled by the security offered by Patrick, who has his own suspicions about the shooting that took place four years ago. As Bob manages to escape prison and begins a meandering journey back home, he is somewhat unprepared for the homecoming he is about to receive.
With a story that is largely insubstantial as far as trajectory is concerned, AIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS is a curious piece of New-Hollywood inflected storytelling that plays like an homage to what is clearly Lowery’s cinematic idols. In actuality, however, it feels like a mere pastiche – though a gorgeous and vividly rendered one. Utilising cinematographer Bradford Young, Lowery here sculpts a delicate tapestry of mild-mannered, slow-paced and flickering textures met with hushed minimalist dialogue spoken by the excellent Mara and Affleck. Yet this is all surface texture within a film that lacks a governing sense of expression. Though he manages to capture a characteristically Kubrick-esque austerity, Lowery gives the appearance of being something of an imitator rather than an all-out filmic wunderkind, which is a pity when he assembles such potentially imaginative ingredients.
AIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS is released in UK cinemas on Friday 6th September.
