“CAUSEWAY” My rating: B+ (Apple TV +)
92 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Watching “The Causeway” I was reminded of “Winter’s Bone” and why we all fell in love with Jennifer Lawrence in the first place.
Lawrence, of course, is a decade, many movies, a couple of Oscars and a motherhood away from that superb indie effort in which she played a child of the Ozarks. But in “Causeway” she exhibits the same emotional honesty, lack of affectation and wise-beyond-her-years intelligence.
“Causeway” is the feature directing debut of Lila Neugebauer, whose credits to date have centered on episodic TV (“Room 104,” “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” “Maid”). It’s a stripped-down, humanistic paen to everyday lives, the sort of story Ken Loach might tell if he were a young American rather than an old Brit.
It’s not showy, but it’s substantial, setting an emotional hook that is not easily shaken.
Lawrence plays Lynsey, who in the film’s first 20 minutes is fighting back from some sort of traumatic experience. She’s living temporarily with Sharon (Jayne Houdyshell), an older woman who offers her home as a sort of halfway house for veterans recovering from life-changing injuries.
Lynsey suffered traumatic brain damage in an IED explosion in Iraq. She’s not scarred on the outside, but her head is all messed up. She has to relearn walking and controlling her hands. Moreover, her emotions have been scrambled. She’s living in a cocoon of numbness, barely able to express a normal range of feelings .
The screenplay (by Ottessa Moshfegh, Luke Gobble and Elizabeth Sanders) follows Lynsey to her hometown of New Orleans where she moves in with her not-unkind-but-definitely-remote mother (Linda Emond) and begins seeing a VA neurologist (Stephen McKinley Henderson) whose OK she needs if she is ever to return to active service.
The yarn’s center is Lynsey’s growing relationship with James (Brian Tyree Henry), an auto mechanic who fixes her broken truck, offers her a ride home and ends up becoming her best — hell, her only — friend.
Brian Tyree Henry, Jennifer Lawrence
James is just as damaged in his own way as Lynsey. His big bad moment came in an auto accident on a nearby causeway, a horror that claimed the life of his nephew and resulted in the destruction of his marriage. Now he relies on weed and beer to numb all the raw edges of his bruised psyche.
In a weird way, Lynsey and James were made for one another.
But not in the movie-romance manner you might expect. Fro one thing, Lynsey is gay (a revelation the film drops matter of factly…it’s no big deal). Plus, these two are far more important to one another as emotional/intellectual sounding boards than as lovers. Getting their rocks off is pretty far down their list of essential needs.
“Causeway” explores these two with unhurried calm and a minimum of fuss. The film is in many ways anti-dramatic. No big Oscar-bait scenes. Instead it offers a steady drip of insight into its characters’ lives,
The results feel absolutely, inarguably real. Lawrence and Henry (he plays the rapper Paper Boi on TV’s “Atlanta”) imbue their roles with aching loss and a quiet dignity. They give two of the year’s most effective (if understated) performances.
| Robert W. Butler
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