“Ain’t Them Bodies Saints,” as its honky-tonk title implies, is a sort of western. The film opts for a Terrence Malick-esque approach in order to assure skeptics that, at its core, it’s just a good, old American art film pretending to be a western.
This isn’t inherently a bad thing, but director David Lowery has ventured off on a misinterpretation of Malick’s modus operandi, aiming for the feel of an art film – the pretty pictures and the unconventional narrative – while neglecting to fill it out with anything tangible. “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” is a hollow husk of a film, signposting the mythos of American outlaws yet never taking it at face value, using its art film signifiers to hide its fundamental insubstantiality.
“Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” opens with a title card that says, “This was in Texas,” yet most of the film is set in Montana, where outlaw Ruth Guthrie (Rooney Mara) waits for her outlaw husband Bob Muldoon (Casey Affleck) to get out of prison and reunite with her. In a sense the film plays as an epilogue to the typical “Bonnie and Clyde” lovers-on-the-run tale, more a tale of domesticity than gunplay (although there’s plenty of that, too).
This all seems like an interesting twist on the genre, but the execution seems to pit the film against itself. Where the story – which largely consists of Mara waiting around, pouting, while Affleck sweats and travels – offers small, quiet and measured human drama, Lowery seems never to be content with letting a scene play out, opting to cut up every moment into little pieces until only jabs of unfulfilled drama remain.
This sort of frenetic, elliptical filmmaking seems to be a carryover from “Upstream Color,” which Lowery edited. But where that film got away with its abstracted style because its characters were, at best, ciphers, the characters of “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” are supposedly deeper, evoking the sort of innately tragic romantics that demand close examination.
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They don’t get their due. Mara does her best with a sensitive, if overwrought, performance, vulnerable with a touch of hard-boiled. Affleck has fun with his drawl. Ben Foster comes close to rendering his third wheel police officer – who pops by to try and steal Ruth away – a three-dimensional character.
But it’s all lost in the rush. Whenever Mara manages an evocative brand of desperation, Lowery decides that it’s time to check in on Bob’s shootout problems. Whenever Foster seems to be generating chemistry with Mara, suddenly there’s a screensaver-worthy shot of the sunset that simply must be attended to. Every time the film comes close to making its characters worth caring about, Lowery busies himself with looking away. For a film that winds up mostly being about longing, all one ends up longing for is a close-up that lasts more than a second.
There’s one bright spot that escapes unscathed from the editing room. The score, by Daniel Hart, is an understated and original take on acoustic western melancholy, minimal but effective, mostly wasted on a film that never bothers to slow down and luxuriate in it.
In a very literal sense, Bradford Young’s cinematography is also chock full of bright spots, with a selection of second-rate Jeff Nichols-esque exteriors that are only matched in artificial prettiness by his very moody interiors, which for some reason never quite escape looking like set pieces.
But that’s mostly all the film’s got going for it – a good score and some superficial prettiness (though for a certain type of viewer, even the prettiness is easily disputed). Its faux-western narrative and chiseled-bare characters lunge for some tragic emotion and land in a vast cemetery of discarded images and abandoned genre conventions. Its determined stylization fails to do anything to pull the characters from the grave, and more often than not buries them further.
“Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” tries for an intense and beautiful experience and winds up with a template of what might have been – it’s a film full of artsy pretensions that never quite escapes the pretense.