Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck play lovers Ruth and Bob, young adults who grew up fast under the watch of a dubious father figure (Keith Carradine) and ended up as small-time hold-up cowboys with a pick-up in place of a horse. Their world is sketched in with impressionistic snapshots, a mix of romantic hope and a doomed trajectory that ends in a shoot-out in an abandoned shack that looks like it's been standing since the end of the old west, a prison term for Bob, and Ruth raising their daughter as a single mother, looked after by Skerrit (the shady but paternal retired outlaw played by Carradine) and looked in on by the lovesick policeman (Ben Foster) wounded in the shoot-out. He may or may not know the truth about who really pulled the trigger but he nonetheless still moons over Ruth and dotes on her daughter. It's a delicate equilibrium that threatens to teeter over when Bob escapes lockup, sneaking back into home territory but staying on the outskirts. Because if there's one thing law enforcement knows, it's that Ruth means more to him than life itself. He's written her every day he's been in prison.
Ruth and Bob are no Bonnie and Clyde--they aren't ruthless criminals as much as kids born to the outlaw way of life in a culture without many alternatives--and Ain't Them Bodies Saints isn't above heists and crime sprees. It's a character piece about the foolish things people do for love, directed from a script that plays as if all the exposition has been edited it. Affleck's drawling, mumbling Bob is the richest character he's played in years, a guy with hard-won survival instincts driven by emotion over calculation. He's not escaping from prison so much as escaping to Ruth and his daughter, the only things that matter to him, and there is a ferocity under his sleepy-eyed manner. Mara's Ruth has given up reckless love for the pragmatisms of motherhood, haunted by her love for Bob but cleared-eyed about the hopelessness of any future together.
This is the second feature from director David Lowery but his first with professional actors and a budget of any size and he uses it to create a film of mood and texture. In addition to directing movies, Lowery has been a film editor for fellow indie directors and his vita includes some of the most impressive low-budget American indies of the past couple of years, including Shane Carruth's enigmatic Upstream Color, which also emphasizes texture and tone and the immediate experience over exposition and backstory.
Lowery doesn't provide any specifics as to time or place, just suggestions in the rural landscape, the half-abandoned towns of aging, unkempt buildings, the makes and models of the cars, and the absence of modern electronic technology. This is a world of jukeboxes and car radios, incandescent light bulbs and rabbit ears on little TV sets. Lowery has an attention to tone and atmosphere, to the nowness of the moment, letting it all settle into the image and the narrative, while the quality of light (from the magic hour exteriors to interiors lit by hurricane lamp and incandescent bulbs) warms the film while coloring it like a yellowed memory.
Comparisons to Terrence Malick are not misplaced, but this has more in common with Altman's Thieves Like Us than Badlands. Bob is both a wild kid and cold killer and Ruth is the devoted mother and lover balancing her heart's desire with her realist's understanding of how his desperate prison escape is destined to end. For all the poetry of his filmmaking, this isn't a romance of outlaw innocents on the run. This life doesn't offer happy endings, but these people do have a kindness and compassion under their desperation that makes the effort worthwhile.
On Blu-ray and DVD from IFC Films. It's a gorgeous film and the Blu-ray preserves those burned, aged, sun-burned colors of the days and the deep black hole of night in this rural outpost. Both editions also feature a documentary, deleted scenes, teasers, trailers, and a music video among the supplements, but the most impressive bonus is Lowery's debut feature St. Nick, never before released on disc. The story of two young runaways, an unnamed young brother and sister living in an abandoned house in a rural Texas landscape similar to Saints, it is intimate and delicate and uneasy, a film that refuses to spell out the backstory and simply observes their tenuous existence on the margins of society, scavenging food and making up games to occupy their days until they are inevitably found and reclaimed by the society they left behind. St. Nick played a few film festivals but never received a theatrical release. This is the first opportunity most people will have to see it and it makes a lovely companion piece to Ain't Them Bodies Saints.
By Sean Axmaker
