Fancy watching a strange looking man singing not once but twice and almost certainly on both occasions incredibly out of tune and only truly appreciated by cats and dogs in a three mile radius whilst also telling you everything and indeed nothing at all in appreciation of Lynne Ramsay’s “You Were Never Really Here”?
Welcome, to the real world (stop it) to “Saturday Night at the Movies” (vol.2)
22nd January 2023
“It is a beautiful day”
Following the re-release of my original rambling musings on 2011’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin” I confessed to seeing and loving director Lynne Ramsay’s fourth cinematic creation on or near its 2017 release date and vowed to add my thoughts immediately to my on-going career appreciation blog article for the Glasgow born filmmaker.
So nearly six years later, here are those thoughts on a genre defying beauty of a film that I re-watched on a cold Friday night into an early Saturday morning this week and I’m pleased to report that I still loved it (though not as much as We Need to Talk About Kevin), the ending is still spectacularly satisfying (a rarity for me) and Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is still as mesmerising as I remember it to be.
Which naturally goes without saying.
Naturally.
“Joe” (Joaquin Phoenix) Of the 53 acting credits listed against the Puerto Rican born Oscar winner, 15 of those are attributed to either short films or TV series, “Hill Street Blues” and “Murder, She Wrote” amongst them. Of the remaining 38 big screen feature film roles, I’ve seen 15, from “8MM” and “Gladiator” at the turn of the century through the 2000’s and his collaborations with Lynne Ramsay here as well as M Night Shyamalan and Paul Thomas Anderson and now up to the present day with his brilliantly controversial Oscar turn as “Arthur Fleck” and the “Joker” in 2019 as well as the underrated joy that is the Mike Mills directed “C’Mon C’Mon” in 2021.
“Beau is Afraid”, directed by Ari Aster, is due for release in April of this year.
In a film of just 89 minutes and 32 total characters many of whom are deliberately vague and purely periphery, Phoenix has to carry this film and he does so magnificently. After a wordless opening of deliberately obscure camera angles and “Joe” never fully shown, what is portrayed is a scene of murder, bloody violence, a hammer and a half shown man meticulously cleaning away the grisly evidence of an unseen killing. Leaving the scene of the crime and what appears to be a hotel, Joe sets off the fire alarm before being seen for the first time in full. Unkempt and bearded, he cuts a physically broken figure and is immediately randomly attacked in an alleyway. Violently headbutting his assailant and breaking his nose, it’s quickly apparent that Joe is a “gun for hire” and he has nothing left to lose. An abuse survivor and veteran haunted by his experiences of war, Joe is also visited regularly by the nightmares of his life post war and his oft refrain of “What the fuck are we doing here?” juxtaposed with the debilitating waking nightmares that drive him regularly to try to end his life. Joe is suicidal with only a singular care left in a world he wants to permanently leave behind.
Thus he’s perfect for his next “job”.
Employing horribly jolting flashbacks amid the equally tension inducing musical soundtrack of Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, director Ramsay once again takes us all on a difficult to watch ride, from the narrative build up to one brutal night in New York and Joe’s destruction of a paedophile ring of child traffickers and their self titled “Playground”, before turning his world upside down despite accomplishing his grisly task as well as rescuing politician’s daughter “Nina Votto” (Ekaterina Samsonov). The narrative turns are impressive, the ending rather satisfying, and in between the Glasgow born filmmaker never allows you to settle into a film that never deliberately settles and never stops until the very last pleasingly satisfying frame. The violence is grisly, bloody and often only shown via black and white CCTV cameras or brilliantly, a heavily cracked ceiling mirror, but the bloody mindless killing is seen far less than the human destruction of a haunted man trying to escape his past whilst living on the edge of death. Everything from Jonny Greenwood’s score to Lynne Ramsay’s direction is deliberately jagged, contorted, fragmented, images and sounds clashing together. I never settled. I marvelled at Phoenix’s incredible performance. And I’ll never listen to “I’ve been to Paradise but I’ve, never been to me” by Charlene D’Angelo the same ever, ever again!
When you’ve seen the film, perhaps you’ll feel the same!
Compared to Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver”, I’d agree but also lean toward a more contemporary film in the guise of 1994’s “Leon” starring Jean Reno and Natalie Portman but more importantly, You Were Never Really Here is a fourth consecutive cinematic gem from director Lynne Ramsay, and I highly recommend it to you.
“You Were Never Really Here” can also be found singing and dancing within my final volume of “Essential Film Reviews Collection” on Amazon, with all 7 volumes free to read should you have an Amazon Kindle “Unlimited” package. Whilst you’re on my Amazon page, why not treat yourself to one of these fantastic self-published books too!
"The Essential Film Reviews Collection" VOL.7 - link to Amazon
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.