You Were Never Really Here

You Were Never Really Here

I was very lucky to be working at the ArcLight theater in Hollywood when this film came out, because Joaquin Phoenix himself came to the theater to personally present the film and do a Q and A afterwards. Then he showed up again the next morning and proceeded to hang out at ArcLight the entire day, surprising audiences by walking into their theaters and introducing the movie. He then proceeded to do this for another entire day, which is when I was training for the job, so you could imagine how distracting it would be to try and listen to how to make popcorn when Joaquin Phoenix is laughing and hanging out just a few feet away.

I didn't get a chance to see the movie then, but this past week I was able to make the time to finally check it out.

This is my first Lynne Ramsay film (We Need to Talk About Kevin and Ratcatcher have been on my list for years but I still haven't made the time to watch them) and she is clearly brilliant when it comes to the language of film. She creates a wonderfully dreadful tone through the visual elements of the editing and cinematography, as well as the sound editing. The acting is also fantastic, with Joaquin Phoenix turning in a brilliant-as-always performance, as does Judith Roberts (the girl across the hall in Eraserhead) as Phoenix's mother, and Ekaterina Samsonov is very memorable as the teenage girl that Phoenix is tasked with saving.

Spoilers.

The downside is this: It's about a veteran with PTSD who is now a loner and saves a girl from a sex trafficking ring by killing everyone inside the house that these horrible acts are taking place in. Sound familiar? It's Taxi Driver word for word. The only difference is that this guy isn't a taxi driver, his job is saving girls from sex trafficking rings, which is kinda like remaking Jaws and making Roy Scheider's character a professional shark hunter - it misses the point.

Taxi Driver is about a horrible guy who does something good by doing something horrible. It's grimy and complex, which is why it's great. You Were Never Really Here is about a guy who kills people professionally but has a hard time doing it because he's traumatized from killing people professionally - it feels sort of unnecessary. Why doesn't he just stop killing people? And if the answer is "He can't because he's addicted to killing people", then that needs to be made clear, maybe by seeing him do it unprofessionally. We sort of get it when he vengeance-kills some guys who kill his mother, but that still feels justified. It needs to be made clear that this guy can't help but kill people, whether it's through a flashback or a conversation or literally anything. All we get are vague glimpses into his past, mainly involving childhood abuse, but never anything implying that he can't help but kill people.

I'm searching for more things to say but can't really think of anything. It looks great and the acting is great, but the plot is far too familiar and never really exceeds being a simple revenge movie. The closest it comes is a scene where Phoenix is killing one of the men who killed his mother, and for a moment they stop fighting and sing along to a song on the radio. It's a deeply bizarre but also profoundly powerful moment in an otherwise somewhat forgettable movie.

If you've been wanting to see this movie you should, you might get more out of it than I did, but I can't exactly recommend it on the simple basis of it not having much of an effect on me. I may come back to it, as this may be a film I'm completely wrong about and just need to see again in the right context, but as of right now I'm not a fan.