MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects and now David Lowery’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints all have their strong points, but what unites them is the crucial performances given in each of these distinct movies by Rooney Mara. The 28-year-old American actress, whose slight frame can plainly accommodate no end of psychological stances and emotional extremes, is the most fascinating mainstream actor to emerge in years. Each director has found the pulse of their movie within Mara’s character, whether defiant for Fincher or now regretful and practical for Lowery, and it’s a pleasure to take in each performance.
Mara humanises what could have been an artful exercise in style.
In this American independent release, Mara is first seen striding towards the camera that knows to back away, as if her anger is a force field. Her Ruth Guthrie is leaving, for the moment, Casey Affleck’s Bob Muldoon, although his laughing attempts to persuade her otherwise suggest that both know that they’re meant to be together. Lovers in a working class Texas milieu in what may be the mid-1960s (the hazy mood doesn’t deal with specifics), the pair’s dedication extends to Bob’s matter of fact self-belief, which soon has them fleeing police after he and Ruth’s brother pull a failed robbery.
A brief, bloody shootout sees Ruth’s brother dead and she shoots a police officer, Patrick Wheeler (Ben Foster), although Bob takes the blame, going to jail while she is released to bear their baby daughter, Sylvie. Throughout the movie, Lowery, an editor and director whose previous features didn’t travel widely, catches the charged energy that flows between bodies in close proximity, and that’s established by Bob and Ruth being led away handcuffed but nuzzling their heads together. He will be back.
Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is readily identifiable as the offshoot of Terrence Malick (Badlands) and Robert Altman (Thieves Like Us), and the link is made concrete by the casting of Keith Carradine, who started in the latter three decades ago, as Skerritt, the store owner who adopted Ruth and her brother, and now decides that Bob, who has succeeded on his sixth attempt to escape, must not get back to Ruth and four-year-old Sylvie.
Prairie-quiet narration, magic hour shots and a sense of menace that’s almost polite until it turns deadly all inform the mood of Lowery’s film, and it takes you a while to realise that the affable but fixated Bob does not set the narrative’s tone, it is Ruth. In a film where romance and danger are blood kin, Mara’s single mother is torn between her head and her heart, and the force of her struggle offsets for the mythic feel. Unaware that she shot him, Officer Wheeler has inserted himself into Ruth’s life, updating her on Bob’s movements and very gently making his intentions clear.
This is the first time that Ben Foster, usually a timebomb waiting to explode, has disappeared into a role, and he helps make plausible the choice Ruth has to make even as bounty hunters arrive and the stakes are raised. With that icy sibilance banished from her voice, Rooney Mara humanises what could have been an artful exercise in style. Watching Ruth tend to Sylvie or walking home from church, you get a sense of a complete life, full of contradictions and choices that she doesn’t want to make. Once again those small shoulders carry a heavy burden.
Watch 'Ain't Them Bodies Saints' at SBS On Demand
Source: SBS Movies
