You Were Never Really Here

Dir: Lynne Ramsay

2017

*****

Those that know Jonathan Ames’s work know of his childhood neuroses and the unusual experiences he had growing up but I can’t say I ever saw Lynne Ramsay as the obvious director of his debut novel You Were Never Really Here. Don’t get me wrong, Ramsay is a director whom I adore and is one of the few film makers I think could just about direct any script and make a brilliant film out of it. Most of her films deal with troubled childhoods but Ames is so Charles Bukowski-like, that I would never have considered her for the novel’s adaptation. After watching the film it made total sense. It’s a masterpiece. If I was to declare that Stanley Kubrick was still alive and well I would be saying it out of respect and it would be a compliment but I’m not going to because Lynne Ramsay doesn’t really need comparison – she is a great film maker in her own right. I have followed her from the beginning – her 1996 debut short film Small Deaths is a masterwork and everything she’s made since is near perfect. The only difference in her work is the quality of the cameras she uses and that is it. The story is about Joe, a slightly disheveled man in his late-forties who seems somewhat detached from the world around him. He cares for his elderly mother who has dementia in his childhood home in New York City. He has constant flashbacks to his childhood, abuse he and his mother faced from his violent father, and brutal past in the military. He has constant suicidal thoughts and his mother’s care is probably the only thing keeping him from acting upon them. Due to his previous history in the military and FBI, and given the fact that he cares little for his own safety, Joe works as a hired gun, famous for using brutal methods. While returning home from a job that we only catch glimpses of, Joe visits Angel, the middleman between Joe and Joe's handler John McCleary. Joe meets with McCleary and expresses his concern that Angel knows his address and may pose a safety risk. McCleary doesn’t really listen to Joe and Joe doesn’t really listen to McCleary. However, McCleary offers him a big job, one that he believes will make them both a great deal of money. Joe accepts. The new job is for a New York State Senator, Albert Votto, who has offered a large sum of money to discreetly rescue his abducted daughter, Nina from a group of sex traffickers. He asks Joe to be extra brutal and to hurt those involved. Joe stakes out a brothel for wealthy patrons, the address of which was received by Votto in an anonymous text. He kills several security guards and patrons and rescues Nina. While they wait at a motel, the news reports that Votto has committed suicide. Police officers discretely enter the motel room, killing the clerk and taking Nina. Another officer attempts to kill Joe, but only manages to shoot him in the mouth. Joe overpowers the officer, kills him and escapes. Joe finds that McCleary, Angel, and Angel's son have been killed in search of his home address. He sneaks into his home and discovers that two federal agents have murdered his mother and are waiting for him. He kills one and mortally wounds the other, who reveals that the conspiracy was orchestrated by Governor Williams, and that Nina is "his favorite." Joe gives his mother a water burial. He loads his pockets with stones and goes into the water, but he has a vision of Nina and swims back to the surface. Joe concludes that Votto sold Nina into prostitution to gain favor with Williams and other elites, and felt guilty after receiving the anonymous text. Votto hired Joe as the police are under Williams' control. While Joe is free of the responsibility of looking after his mother, has no job or indeed anything left to live for, it is Nina that ultimately calls him and gives him a reason to live. The conclusion is brutal, beautiful and about as intense as it gets. It has to be one of Joaquin Phoenix’s most convincing and powerful performances. The flashbacks of childhood inter-cut with present day – particularly when Joe finds comfort in asphyxiation in his bedroom wardrobe – are brilliantly handled and the sort of thing Ramsay excels at. I can see much of her earlier work here, just done on a grander scale. The direction is superb, the lighting is exquisite and the soundtrack by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood is incredible. Ramsay’s reworking of the story is very well handled and the way she depicts the on screen violence is very clever. Very little actual violence is shown in the film, but rather the aftermath of violent scenes. Ramsay stated that before this movie she had never done anything with a gun, so she had to figure out how to approach violence for the first time – although a similar technique was used towards the end of We Need to Talk About Kevin and Morvern Callar in some respects. Budget constraints didn't allow her to shoot complex action scenes, so this gave birth to the idea to show "post rage aftermath scenes" instead of the violence itself. Lynne Ramsay confessed she thought it was very risky to use this approach, because if it didn't work she wasn't able to go back and re-shoot the scenes but it worked remarkably well. Likewise, in the novel the main character Joe uses a lot of props like latex gloves and gadgets. Ramsay stated that it was Joaquin Phoenix who suggested to get rid of most props to keep the character more authentic. With all his amazing facial expressions Phoenix really didn’t need any props. It’s a remarkably short film for a thriller but it is probably just as well as it is almost unbearably intense. Dizzying and horrifying, You Were Never Really Here is both stark and dreamlike at the same time. A powerhouse bit of film making from one of the best directors working today and one of the greatest actors of our time. Faultless.