Welcome back, Jennifer Lawrence, who as recently as 2015/16 was the world’s highest paid actress and in Causeway reminds us why. And perhaps needed to – so many films she’s appeared in since her high-water mark have been just a touch underwhelming.
And welcome to the big time for Brian Tyree Henry. Oscar-nominated for his role here, he’s been impressive in everything he’s been in for years, but it was 2020’s The Outside Story that proved he could carry an entire movie on his own.
In what’s largely a two-hander – it could almost be a play in a studio theatre – Lawrence plays a soldier suffering post-traumatic physical and mental trauma after having been blown up by an IED in Afghanistan, while Henry plays the owner of the garage Lynsey (Lawrence) brings her truck into when it breaks down.
We have met Lynsey already, and in the film’s opening shot – of the back of Lynsey’s head, her face less than an eighth turned towards the camera – director Lila Neugebauer visually sets up the film’s theme, of facing up to stuff, and sets running the dramatic hare that’s going to course through this movie… until it drops from exhaustion just before the end.
We’ve watched as Lynsey is nursed partway back to health, being helped to go to the toilet and brush her teeth, relearning to walk, Lawrence precisely conveying internal frustration at her current state while suggesting a military bearing – beneath the wreckage Lynsey has a memory of military training.
Neugebauer and DP Diego García (so vital to the success of 2015’s brilliant Neon Bull) shoot it like many a misery memoir – flat, cool, longish takes. But Causeway isn’t a misery memoir, it’s more of a muted psychological thriller, the mystery at its centre being Lynsey.
Which takes on more colour and depth once Lynsey leaves the rehab halfway house she’s been sharing with kindly therapist Sharon (Jayne Houdyshell) and moves back home, where her mother (Linda Emond) lives out her life a notch above the poor-white-trash movie stereotype.
It’s here, back home, that she meets James (Henry), a decent person, like her, with a history. They recognise something in each other – a gap, a lack, something broken. And they embark on a tentative relationship of sorts, one with no time for sympathy but with guilt also lurking.
All the way through Lynsey’s recovery continues apace, and her desperation to “redeploy” sees her visiting her doctor (Stephen McKinley Henderson), hoping he’ll sign her off as being fit enough to resume military life.
It’s Lynsey’s relationship to self-knowledge that the film is really about – James seems to know only too well what he’s about – but there’s also tangentially an examination of the type of person who signs on for military service and why they might be desperate to get back to a place like Afghanistan in spite of having been nearly killed by a roadside bomb. What sort of home life they might have had. What sort of town they might have come from. What sort of prospects they might have had if it weren’t for the military.
The Covid pandemic shut down production on Causeway for a while and Lawrence and Henry took the opportunity to workshop their roles together. I’d say it’s paid off – except I have no idea what their performances would have been like if they hadn’t workshopped away – but either way both are gripping to watch, delivering performances that constantly function on two levels: what Lynsey and James are projecting and what they’re processing.
It’s perhaps best watched for that reason, as a vehicle for superb performances. Because towards the end Causeway, having set up two characters on some sort of collision course, attempts to pull off a finish that’s both true to itself and just a touch Hollywood. Elegant and yet satisfying, pretty and practical. It works, kind of, though it leaves the back end of the movie pirouetting in space.
Causeway – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
