Nick-Davis.com: You Were Never Really Here

You Were Never Really Here
First screened in April 2018

Director: Lynne Ramsay. Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Ekaterina Samsonov, Judith Roberts, Alessandro Nivola, Alex Manette, Dante Pereira-Olson, Kate Easton, John Doman, Frank Pando, Vinicius Damasceno. Screenplay: Lynne Ramsay (based on the novel by Jonathan Ames).

Twitter Capsule: Manchester by the Charnel House. Too bullish a showcase for its own serrated craftsmanship? Still: wow.

VOR: ⑤ Ramsay's intrepid experiments with cinematography, sound, and editing remain vital even when they miss the bullseye. Major work from Phoenix, too.

Lynne Ramsay evidently derived her Cannes-winning screenplay for You Were Never Really Here from a 97-page novel by Jonathan Ames, but the movie betrays no literary base at all. Whatever process of adaptation transpired here suggests how a corpse is adapted from a double-barreled shotgun that's just been fired, or how a skeleton is adapted from a Thanksgiving turkey: with precision, strength, and at least one razor-sharp blade.

You Were Never Really Here unfolds as a pure emanation of scaly sound, fanged image, and snakelike rhythms. It basks, it slithers, it moves forward by moving sideways, it suddenly pounces right at you. Especially in its montage techniques, what we experience suggests a private atélier show of new ways cinema might evolve more than a finished film, per se. It's not even clear if the film was finished. Ramsay admitted that the version that played on the last day of Cannes and scooped two prizes was still incomplete, and to hear Alessandro Nivola tell it, the process blew right past "fluid" and maybe even surpassed "chaotic." (An all-but-silent Nivola plays a governor in the climactic sections, but that wasn't the character he was playing on set, in the radically repurposed footage.)

I haven't established what, if anything, changed in the version that hit theaters, but given the nearly year-long delay, I bet it was something. And I bet it made a short, tight picture even shorter and tighter. Editor Joe Bini, a regular Herzog accomplice and a Ramsay vet from We Need to Talk about Kevin, seems to have cut the movie on a deli-meat slicer, then arranged and timed the cuts as almost nobody else would. He and Ramsay might have taken their experiment a little far, especially in the final third, but it's a staggering display of boldness and skill, and a reason in itself the movie will endure. Bini is almost a co-protagonist of the movie, and it feels right that he shares a name with the one on camera.

Prodigious sound designer Paul Davies, a staple of every Ramsay feature, once again works dark, glistering miracles and overlays elements in ways that serve environment, character, and what counts here as story, however ruthlessly pared. As usual, I wish he and Ramsay had been more sparing with their catalogue of favorite mid-century crooners and kitsch-pop—the one area they continue to indulge themselves in ways that weaken scenes and risk affectation, when most of their labor works in the opposite direction of muscling up and complicating what's been shot and cut together. But it's still a thrilling job, as is that of cinematographer Tom Townend, a close Ramsay associate from the outset getting his only department-head credit on one of her full-length films. Few d.p.s and few directors would think to fill this story with so much full-bodied color, even at a late-film dinner that's basically a Sartrean purgatory, or to so fully light a story that's all about grotty corners and onyx recesses, both spatial and psychological. Townend and Ramsay even shoot under full, resplendent sunshine the burial of a body in a remote lake, which by genre tradition and for plot reasons ought surely to have happened under cover of night—though it soon emerges why the person disposing of this fiercely mourned cadaver isn't even taking care to conceal himself.

You Were Never Really Here is full of little traps like that—moments where the filmmakers seem to break their own story rules, or those of grammar, or those of deepest, darkest, most nihilistic noir, only to betray a scheme I hadn't caught onto yet. There's still room to second-guess major aspects of the film. As shot, as played, and as semi-integrated, most of the scenes with Nina Votto, a young character who sits at the sordid center of the movie's scenario, feel out of step with the rest: way too haloed, unevenly acted, whittled down as if compensating for problems rather than in pursuit of innovation and potent concision.

But there is much more often a fearsome method to this movie's cruel and despondent madness. For sheer post-traumatic and mid-traumatic tonnage, it's hard to think of a heavier character study in recent cinema, or any cinema. I marvel at the degree of mutual trust and full creative consanguinity that would have been required between Ramsay and Joaquin Phoenix to achieve what they do here, or how quiet and controlled an environment must have been created for this performer, especially, even if plenty of other colleagues felt totally at sixes and sevens with Ramsay's entropic process. Phoenix rewards her, her film, and himself with a portrayal of bottomless misery that still navigates a wide range of notes. His "Joe" never stops having to act, to think, to calculate, even though all he wants to do is shut down, permanently. He's remarkably tender with his aging, memory-addled mother (sharply etched by Judith Roberts), even as he's nearing the end of his rope with that care-taking situation, and with every situation.

Phoenix has the hair of an aging samurai in this movie, the body of a bulldog who has barely made it out of some bloody scrapes with other bulldogs, and the beard and brow of an Edgar Allan Poe character who was buried alive years ago and can't believe, in the most joyless sense, that for some reason he's still breathing. Those eyes, as ever, are deep pools of acid rain but they also convey a lot of life, against the character's wishes. Phoenix finds more color and moment-to-moment surprise in all this than the pure field of black almost any other actor would come up with. He doesn't just perform the scenes but pushes them in different creative directions, as much as the lighting or sound designers do. It's astounding work, worth what you have to go through for 80+ minutes to experience it. Despite so many other artists' vibrantly foregrounded contributions, the movie seems to be coming right out of him, the way Taxi Driver radiated out from De Niro or The Piano Teacher from Isabelle Huppert. I hope he got everything he wanted out of this prime-cut job, and I hope he got rid of it all soon afterward. Grade: A–

(I originally wrote this capsule on Letterboxd, where you can comment.)

Awards:
	Cannes Film Festival: Best Actor (Phoenix); Best Screenplay (tie)
	Independent Spirit Awards: Best Film Editing (Joe Bini)
	Boston Society of Film Critics: Best Director

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