Butler's Cinema Scene

Rooney Mara, Casey Affleck

“AIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS” My rating: C+ (Opening August 30 at the Tivoli and the Rio)

96 minutes| MPAA rating: R

Like its title, “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” tries too damn hard.

The difference between effectiveness and affectation is often a matter of degree, and for my money David Lowery’s Sundance hit  always lays things on just a little too thick.

Or perhaps not thick enough.

In this norish crime drama/romance Lowery apparently is trying to channel Terernce Malick, particularly the early Malick of “Badlands” and “Days of Heaven,” both of which took the form of dreamlike folk ballads. 

Like virtually all Malick movies, “Ain’t Them Bodies…” relies on voiceover narration by one of the characters (in this case a prison escapee played by Casey Affleck).  And the film unfolds in a classic small American town so frozen in time (old trucks, flower print dresses, denim work shirts, cowboy boots) that I was taken aback late in the story when one character produced a cell phone. Like a Malick effort, the movie has been photographed (by Bradford Young) so as to discover the beauty in human faces,  brown Texas landscapes, and even old buildings losing their peeling paint.

Rooney Mara

The film’s opening minutes lay out the characters’ histories.  Young lovers Bob Muldoon (Affleck) and Ruth Guthrie (Rooney Mara) go on a crime spree (the exact nature of which is not revealed) and promptly find themselves in an abandoned farmhouse surrounded by the law.  A shootout ensues, and through sheer blind luck Ruth wings a deputy. Upon their surrender Bob assumes full responsibility for the crime and the gunfire.

Ruth, you see, is pregnant, and Bob takes all the heat so that she can try to reassemble her life and raise their child in relative peace.

He goes to jail, promising to return. She gets off scott free (the legal issues are ignored), moves into a modest house, gets a low-paying job, and gives birth to a daughter. 

She is watched over by two men. The first is the  grizzled neighbor (Keith Carradine) who was Bob’s mentor and perhaps his  criminal inspiration (again, much is suggested and little is stated). 

The second guardian angel is Patrick (Ben Foster), the deputy Ruth wounded in the shootout — although he doesn’t realize she fired the shot and she isn’t about to tell him. He went to high school with both Ruth and Bob and aches to become a more substantial part of her life. (Foster is so often cast as an eye-rolling crazy that it’s a shock to see him playing a decent, grounded character.)

Ben Foster

You can’t blame Patrick for his infatuation. Mara (“The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo,” Side Effects”) is a hugely watchable screen presense who establishes haunting characters without actually doing all that much. Her Ruth isn’t a big talker and keeps a tight rein on her inner life, so we have to watch her eyes, her posture, her gestures to see what’s percolating underneath. She just looks authentic — her perfomance here has been compared to a Dorothea Lange photo of a Dust Bowl housewife.

The action of the film centers on Bob’s escape from prison (we never actually see it…typical) and his life of hiding out in the woods, stealing cars and trying to make his way back to Ruth and the child he’s never known.  Afflect (who sounds like he’s mumbling even when enunciating) delivers lots of  deadpan pseudo-poetic voiceover.

Obviously the cops know that Bob will try to return, which means that Patrick spends more time than ever in Ruth’s house. And there’s the added problem of several heavily-armed creeps  — evidently old criminal cohorts of Bob’s — who show up to claim the unrecovered cash stolen in Bob’s last job.

Now a man on the run should make for a  fairly exciting tale, but Lowery isn’t having any of that. In fact, the movie seriously drags in its central section before finally generating a bit of heat in the final minutes.

And the film’s near complete lack of pyschological realism — this is a ballad, after all — combined with the threadbare narrative, leaves us with little but pretty pictures to cling to.

But at least they’re really pretty pictures.

|Robert W. Butler