Causeway

dir: Lila Neugebauer

2022

A movie about a depressed Afghan War veteran and a depressed mechanic being a little less depressed when they’re hanging out together? You’d be fighting other audience members to get into the cinema.

This flick could not be more low-key if it tried. It could not be more low-key if it drank a herbal tea with three Ambien while taking a bath. I don’t mean it’s sleepy, I mean just that this flick isn’t big on histrionics or people yelling stuff or changing their facial expressions much.

It’s appropriate to the story being told. It’s low-key, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t stakes. I mean, there aren’t any, but it doesn’t feel aimless.

The curious reality about people who go to war, and get wounded, and come back “home” is that dying in war is seen as a mercy, and that surviving brings with it its own dangers. The terrible statistics about suicide amongst veterans at least to me indicate that surviving a war is only the first step in many, in terms of staying alive.

Lynsey (Jennifer Lawrence), at film’s beginning, is pretty wrecked after surviving an explosion. Even though outwardly she has healed, she suffered a traumatic brain injury which means she walks with difficulty, balance being the issue, but also has difficulty with her arms and hands, with all motor function skills. There’s pain, there’s confusion, there’s the shame of needing help, there’s also the loss of inhibition. When she first meets her patient, saintly carer / nurse (the great Jayne Houdyshell), and hears as to why she got into this line of work, she says to her without thinking “That sounds like a miserable life.”

She thinks, without questioning it, or thinking about the social niceties, that looking after people like her, wounded people like her, would be hell on earth.

It takes a few seconds after she says it, where she looks quietly stunned at what she’s just said, to realise that one shouldn’t tell their carers such things upon first meeting. You should wait a few days at least before you entirely devalue all their life choices.

But the carer has heard and seen it all before. She is unfazed. She is helpful, and understanding, and in no way takes it as the personal insult it was intended to be.

We can assume that Lynsey’s recovery takes a while, but it’s truncated through montage, seeing as her time with the carer is limited (her health insurance as a veteran only takes her so far). And soon she is bussing back to her hometown of New Orleans, a place she never wanted to end up in again.

She really hates being there. I’ve never been, but I’d love to see New Orleans in all its post-Katrina glory.

And it’s not because she’s racist. I mean, she could be racist, it’s not really covered by the film. It’s just that, to her, having to come home is a greater failure than having been grievously wounded in combat. Because she never wanted to come home for any reason. The family home is a rundown affair, and Mom (Linda Emond, who looks familiar, but I can’t think of from where) is not dependable.

It is, in keeping with the flick, low-key undependability, not outright parental neglect or hatred. Instead of being there to pick her up from the bus station, Gloria mumbles about “oh I thought you said Friday, I even took the day off from work, sorry I wasn’t there, dog ate my homework” type bullshit.

It’s okay, Lynsey doesn’t care, and sleeps, or at least is in bed most of the time, avoiding the world.

Her ambitions, initially, are low. Despite being an engineer, she opts to work for a pool cleaning service, as she did when she was younger. From her perspective the ideal part is that she’s working entirely on her own. No people to bother her, or, when the tenants are away, no-one to watch her swimming in their pools.

Her quest for mobility and self-determination hits a brick wall when a) driving the family pick up truck doesn’t get her very far once she starts having panic attacks and b) when the truck breaks down, and she has to take it to a mechanic.

The guy who runs the place, being James (Brian Tyree Henry) immediately takes some kind of shine to her, perhaps because he senses something deeply wounded about her, something which he shares. They start hanging out, and that becomes the core of the film.

It’s not the growing relationship between them that’s the core of the film; well, I didn’t think that was the point of the film – the point was just having the two of them hang out. It’s not meant to be a romantic connection, or at least it doesn’t seem so at first. Especially when, after being accosted by a bead-wearing drunk, she tells James that she’s gay, disabusing him of the notion that things could become romantic (ie. fucking).

So. Two people with no-one else in their lives, hanging out with someone who’s free. Sounds like a recipe for quality cinema.

Well, not the kind of cinema that most people go out of their way to watch.

That is, unless you’re a terrible film nerd like me. I live for this kind of film, where people are praised for underacting and wearing slightly less makeup than usual in what passes for a “natural” look (ugh). Jennifer Lawrence is such a wonderful actor that her not doing stuff here resonates more than if she’d overacted all over the place. In a subdued but keen performance, she gets to express a lot by not wanting to express much if anything. Her Lynsey seems like someone very on the edge of something terrible, even when she’s completely motionless.

There is something of an elephant in the room. We think, or at least I thought for the longest time, that the depression and PTSD made her possibly prone to suicide, as it has been for countless vets of both the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts (what a terrible euphemism “conflict” is for war). Few people appreciate that more vets die from suicide than during their service. I mean, I knew about it, so I thought that was kinda lingering over the film, but I think I was projecting, a bit.

What Lynsey is really at risk from is not coming to terms with her past, her family, and continuing to live at a remove from the world itself, from people. At least that’s how I think the film is really representing her struggle. She becomes convinced that the only way forward or out is the same way forward that she thought she had when she was first deployed: she is convinced that she has to be accepted again and redeployed. To fucking Afghanistan! It’s hard not to get the impression that she would rather die than have another awkward conversation with her mother, who doesn’t seem to know her at all.

The bigger trauma, the one we realise is a bigger wound to her than her traumatic brain injury, is her family, her horror at what it became, her guilt for leaving, her resentment towards her mother and her older brother, but it’s not one she wants to face.

Similarly, James, despite his easygoing demeanor, is missing a leg, and is also missing some other people, whose absence he may be responsible for. Neither James nor Lynsey really want to talk about any of these issues, but they’re happy to smoke dope, drink beers and dance around the subject endlessly, until they get so frustrated that they end up turning on each other. Two people united by trauma / depression are, if we believe this flick, looking for a brief respite from the world (which might last years) and other people, but we’re meant to think that it’s temporary. There’s no permanent solutions in any stories, really, but even less so here.

Until… The flick takes something of a strange turn. It’s not inorganic, as in, it doesn’t totally conflict with the tone thus far or what we’ve heard before, but it feels a tiny bit artificial. It’s used as a precipitating event in order to force them to attack each other and seem like a “break up”.

Lynsey underplays and under-expresses, much of the time, but so does James. He doesn’t seem to feel any particular way about not having a left leg, but he seems to have a lot of guilt and loneliness. But he, like most people, doesn’t talk about it.

When he drunkenly tells Lynsey that she should move in with him, as a housemate, because he has such a big house, he expresses something so simple, and yet so heartfelt and powerful. I am pretty sure that scene alone was why he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor this year, and as great as it would be for him to win, he’s definitely going to be beaten by one of several Irishmen.

He says, pretty low-key, that it would be nice to have coffee with someone, have a smoke in the evening, maybe share a meal every now and then. He feels like he is no longer worthy of being part of humanity, with such guilt, he has kept himself separate from anyone for too long.

That’s no way to live.

For these people.

Introverts are reading that thinking “fuck that and fuck them, not everyone needs people”, and that’s their right. But the clear message is that people need people, or their trauma comes to define their entire existence, and that isn’t healthy.

The performances are excellent, and the script is naturalistic, and delivered as such. It often feels like people are talking at cross-purposes without entirely realising it, and nothing exemplifies that more than the relationship as depicted of mother and daughter. The mum clearly doesn’t understand much about her daughter, or who she really is, or what her reluctance is in engaging with her, or having to put herself in a position to have to rely on her or be vulnerable to her.

But it’s not depicted acrimoniously. There’s no anger or spite, but there is frustration, one which also leads a person to wonder whether there’s any point explaining the whys and wherefores.

Causeway was a pretty great film that was probably watched by handfuls of people before it ended up on Apple tv, which is a shame, because more people need to watch movies about sad people. There are way too many movies about well-adjusted people who aren’t self-medicating all over the place.

8 times there’s an amazing scene just before the end at a prison that I won’t spoil, and it comes completely out of the blue out of 10

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“It can help, to be with people” – it can hurt, though, too - Causeway