I haven’t done this in a while. So here goes.
Just saw 2022’s Causeway.
Spoilers alert.
Mixed feelings.
Wonderful acting in an engaging, never boring, small movie.
Theme, most broadly, is finding a bit of human meaning amidst pervasive personal tragedy and chaos. 1
But film punks out in many places that makes it seem contrived. Some of them:
Glides through too slickly, ie contrives, Jennifer Lawrence’s recovery from severe Afghanistan war injuries.
Can’t resist, while not wanting to glamorize her, showing off her body in scenes of her 2
…in bra and skimpy panties.
Uses her lesbianism to simplify and make less vexing her relationship with car mechanic Brian Tyree Henry.
We never find out exactly what JL’s mother has done to disappoint her yet once more. 3
How is that BTH, running an auto repair business, always has time to come running anytime JL needs some help or company?
I get why he’s traumatized by having been in a car accident that cost his young nephew, Antoine, his life and has forever estranged BTH from his sister, 4
Antoine’s mother, also in the car. But the locus of his guilt over this is that he let Antoine, just a kid, sit in the front passenger seat over his mother’s objection. This as the basis for perpetual moral self flagellation makes little sense and is of a peace with the movie 5
not wanting to confront searing wrong doing, like, say, if he’d driven drunk. We’re told he’d had but two beers.
Of course, we have the anticipated scene we know is inevitable —the acrimonious, enraged shouting match between JL and BTH, when they bore into each other’s 6
weaknesses, self deceptions and self evasions. It’s a contrived set piece that comes across as something scripted rather than what JL and BTH are genuinely saying.
The culmination of all this contrivance is BTH telling JL that she speaks as if her brother is dead, 7
always in the past tense. This comes as shock to her. “He’s not dead,” she exclaims. “He’s a druggie and dealer in prison,” she explains.
A problem with with all this is that nothing in the movie supports this. It’s just imposed on us by it being said. 8
In violation of rules for fiction writing 101, we’re told this, not shown it. So in the penultimate scene, JL shocked into self revelation, sees her brother in jail. Naturally, he’s mute. They sign lovingly. He’s beatific, smilingly happy to see her, sorry for her travails, and 9
topper, at peace with himself, happy in jail, the best place for him, he signs, given his drug habit.
It’s so unrealistic as to be self parodic to the point of silliness.
Over-egging the release from unflagging personal misery pudding is what this scene and film come to. 10
I give the film 5.5/10.
