Directed by: Lynne Ramsay
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Ekaterina Samsonov, Judith Roberts
Rated R, 89 minutes
Eighty-nine minutes isn’t much time to tell a story—it’s quicker than every film that has ever won the Oscar for best picture, for instance (and less than half the length of 10 of those winners). Even the gibberish-speaking blobs of “Minions” took longer to tell their story. Not that a movie this short is necessarily lacking; if anything, a film that’s only 89 minutes long usually has had all its superfluous details cut out, leaving only the most significant parts behind.
In the case of Lynne Ramsay’s (“We Need to Talk About Kevin”) psychological thriller “You Were Never Really Here,” this is both true and misleading. Much has been cut out, but not the excess, not the fluff. Rather, it’s those important skeletal elements that Ramsay has eschewed, instead filling these long 89 minutes with a mix of alienating and overly precious imagery. The result is a disappointingly amateurish film, a vacuous drama dressed up as a thriller dressed up as an art film; worse still, it’s almost immediately forgettable.
Joaquin Phoenix (“The Master”), evidently still in the irascible-uncle phase of his illustrious career, here stars as Joe, a veteran who lives with and cares for his ailing mother (Judith Roberts, “Eraserhead”) and moonlights as a vigilante who rich people call when their children have been kidnapped. Breaking into shady townhouses armed with nothing but his rage and a ball-peen hammer, Joe dispenses quick, brutal justice to those who take part in child abuse and trafficking, and then delivers those children back to their homes.
The movie takes off when a senator from New York state tasks Joe with retrieving his young daughter, Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov, “Wonderstruck”), from a trafficking ring based on the Lower East Side. The rest of the plot is a formality: The job goes awry, Joe finds himself tangled in a web that irreversibly changes his life, yadda yadda yadda—more importantly, though, do you see how he squishes a jelly bean between his fingers in that one scene? Do you see how he wades into a lake dressed in a suit? Do you see how he stares through an elevated subway track with such gravitas?
These would-be evocative images, not the thriller story that serves as their vehicle, are what define “You Were Never Really Here,” and to Ramsay’s credit, they occasionally deliver a gut-punch. Contrast the first time we see Joe stalking his way through a brothel’s narrow, grimy halls, with the second time, when he performs the same quiet search through an opulent old-money mansion. The implication—that human trafficking isn’t just an atrocity perpetrated by members of society’s seedy underbellies, but is also the dark backroom game of elites who can hide their crimes behind walls of money—is stark and deafening; Ramsay’s use of parallelism is revelatory.
Unfortunately, that leaves the rest of the movie, which mucks around with a backstory that involves flashbacks to Joe’s time in the war as well as a traumatic childhood incident. These details are supposed to provide context for Joe’s current state—his reticence, his anger, his tendency to stick his head in plastic bags—but more often than not they feel juvenile, reducing Joe to a couple of one-dimensional sketches of human suffering. All of Joaquin Phoenix’s devout scenery chewing is as good as wasted without something concrete for us to attach it to, making him—and the movie—inscrutable and tiresome. Lynne Ramsay has considerable directorial finesse, but here it’s often pointed in the wrong direction, emphasizing a psychological drama that her own script shies away from.
Moreover, Ramsay’s script is full of lurid moments that must have looked good on paper, but which in practice lack the breath of life, making “You Were Never Really Here” feel less like the work of a veteran filmmaker and more like the first feature by a film school graduate who wrote this pretentious revenge story for a class and had to stretch it out to meet the minimum page count requirement. More precisely, it reads like a poor imitation of “Taxi Driver” by a wide-eyed Scorsese fan, rather than a new interpretation of the same dark, tragic themes. The movie may be atmospherically immersive, but without specificity and without substance, it lacks any lasting power beyond its 89th minute.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 4/27/18.