There's a swirling beauty in the muted color palette in the period outlaw love story
Ain't Them Bodies Saints. The camera flows and swirls, the meticulous compositions are nearly divinely filmed and authentically observed. If there's thing major takeaway from the film that was a hit at this years Sundance Film Festival-- where it garnered a seemingly much deserved cinematography prize-- and I do believe there is just one, it's in the discovery and hopefulness of a great find in director David Lowery. He stages his tale-- one steeped partially in cinematic homage but also carved out of legend-- with such an assurance, a confidence, a tender but sharply honed-in verve, one in such that stretches of the film merely coast on its effervescent dream-like potential. The work of Terrence Malick reads a huge influence aesthetically, but the great Robert Altman films
McCabe and Mr. Miller and
Thieves Like Us and perhaps, most influentially,
Bonnie & Clyde figure in as clear pieces of the framework of this tale of doomed love in the Texas Hill Country in the 1970s.
Bob Muldoon (Casey Affleck) and Ruth Guthrie (Rooney Mara) are the young rebels, without much cause and it's both a strength and weakness of the film that their crimes, either of passion or ennui, are left vague and ambiguous. We start with a shoot out in an old farmhouse. An old-school outlaw versus the police showdown; Ruth, whose just found out she's about to be a mother, has just fired and perhaps shot a police officer; one of their criminal cronies may be dead. It ends peacefully with a promise from Bob to always return to Ruth and their unborn child as the two are cuffed and are taken from their house; the flame of their passion ignites the screen in this seemingly iconic little sequence that teases a lifetime of texture, danger and lived-in romantic desire.
