I’m not even that sure that I liked
David Lowery's debut feature “
Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” enough to write about, but this is one of the pitfalls of reviewing films weekly in a column titled 'Must See'. This is not to say that the film is not good, in fact, it has received rave reviews from almost all the more hoity-toity and high minded critics out there in the big old world – which just goes to show how much of an inexact science/purely opinionated (if you will) occupation film reviewing is.
Lowery’s film, which he wrote and produced at the very prestigious Sundance Institute’s Writing and Producing labs, however much you may not love, is worth writing about though even if just to talk about the state of small, independent minded cinema. Lowery came up through the ranks directing adventurous projects here and there that eventually put on him on the radar enough to be able make a film like “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” which has close to a $4 million budget and a cast with the likes of Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara, Ben Foster, and Keith Carradine.
Perhaps it is the lyrical, low key style that initially attracted such actors to a film like this, or perhaps it was just the fascination of taking a fairly archetypal story (boy meets girl, they rob people, someone gets shot, boy takes blame, goes to jail, girl is pregnant decides to wait) and raising it to a philosophical level. While I’m not sure that Lowery’s intent has actually translated onto the screen (there are often moments that ought to resonate in one’s mind but instead just end up being fairly banal), it is still a worthy attempt. And so we have the ever present argument of intent versus end product, a debate even more present in the making of indie cinema which often goes off the rails in the attempt to make art.
As all film-makers know, those who strive towards making cinematic art fail much more than we succeed, more often than not ending up with something that looks awfully pretentious and ridiculously high minded, affecting the audience in exactly the opposite way that we intended. This almost always happens to first time or less experienced directors and this is what I feel has stopped “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” from being truly great.
In its struggle to be poetic and cinematic, it has missed the true human element. While the highly talented actors say beautiful things (the script is quite gorgeous), we don’t actually believe them, and that is a bit of a tragedy for Lowery. However, without this kind of struggle, there would be no really risky, truly great independent cinema, the great Terrence Mallick (to whom Lowery has been compared) being a case in point. Lately with “To The Wonder” (2012) and “The Tree of Life” (2011) Mallick has failed to make our minds soar in the way he used to with “Days of Heaven” (1978) and “The Thin Red Line” (1998) – but regardless of this it is important to remember that both him and Lowery have broken boundaries and experimented in order to be able to finally come to something worthwhile.
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