You Were Never Really Here Plot Summary:
A man (Joaquin Phoenix) with a traumatized past who rescues missing girls from traffickers in brutal fashion is put in further distress when his latest mission to find a Senator’s (Alex Manette) daughter (Ekaterina Samsonov) goes horribly wrong.
You Were Never Really Here is a psychological thriller, emphasis on the word psychological. This movie is like somebody taking Drive and making it more Drive. It’s 95% inner turmoil, 5 % plot. It’s a pure study about a man who’s deeply disturbed and at the end of his rope. The story is background noise. This is a concept I can easily get on board with. There are so many great elements here: The acting. The look. It feels intimate as hell. At the end of the day though, the movie needs to adhere to some semblance of storytelling. I’m not saying this is Terrence Malick. There’s a beginning, middle and end. The problem is the plot is so poorly constructed that I can’t get into the character like they so desperately want me to.
You can tell a massive effort was put into this film. We’ll get to Joaquin Phoenix later, who plays Joe, our emotionally unstable protagonist. The look of the film is gorgeous in an unexpected way. It’s perfectly grimy and dingy. Even Joe’s house is carefully detailed. Joe cares for his ailing mother (Judith Roberts), who’s facing some kind of dementia. The mold infested fridge is so full of expired foods and faded groceries. You can smell how bad it is from the seat in your theater.
Joe himself is also detailed. Everything from the way Joe walks to the ragged clothes he wears, you instantly get his character. The most striking image in this film is when Joe removes his shirt after a job. This man has been beaten and battered like he’s been playing in the NFL for forty years. You can feel the bruises.
Joe’s character reminds me a lot of the Driver from Drive and Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler. As I said, it’s all inner pain. The shaking. The understated facial expressions. The feeling like this guy could pop at any second. Joaquin Phoenix is acting his ass off. There are moments at the end where he’s practically putting on a clinic in subtle acting. Despite all that, I’m just not invested in this movie.
The difference between this movie and the Drives and Wrestlers of the world is the story enhanced who those characters were. While I have a good sense of Joe’s state of mind, the character is fluttering in a nothing story. We knew what the Driver wanted – normalcy. We knew what the Wrestler wanted – relevance. Joe wants, uh, well, there’s the thing. He wants to save the girl, but then he walks around. Uh, I don’t know. The writing does a good job of humanizing Joe in the early scenes with his mother, and there are times when he’s even childlike. What this movie essentially boils down to though is a guy wandering around who’s always on the cusp of madness.
There’s sort of a story thread here. The plot-centric scenes where he visits his handler, played by John Doman, or when the Senator begs him to find his daughter feel like chores in this movie. While the actual ending is decent, albeit predictable, it gets there kicking and screaming. The antagonist in the film maybe has three seconds of screen time. The director’s argument will be, “the real antagonist is himself,” but if that’s the case, we have to get to know this guy even more.
As much as we get a sense of who Joe is due to Phoenix’s brilliant performance, the film does a bad job of peppering in these little flashbacks of his troubled past. Something clearly bad happened to Joe in the military and when he was a child, but these are just snippets. If you blink, you’ll miss them entirely. I’m all for movies not spoon feeding you everything, but this is overly cryptic.
One of the strengths and weaknesses is how Joe’s violence is portrayed. His methods are constantly referred to as brutal, but you never really see it. It’s more mystique. It’s intriguing at first, but as the film goes on, it feels more lazy than clever.
What did strike me is how similar this is to Logan. Joe is Wolverine. He tries to end it several times, but there’s always something that pulls him back into being the hero at the last second. This score is also a horrible rendition of Logan’s score. It sounds like somebody slipping on a drum set for nine consecutive hours. Oy vey.
If you really love the artistic route over normal storytelling conventions, you’d probably eat this up. This is worth seeing at home for Joaquin Phoenix and Ekaterina Samsonov, who plays Nina, the young girl Joe is tasked with saving. Her last scene in the film is right up there with Phoenix’s acting. The visual components are also stellar, but this is a daunting watch. At only ninety minutes, it feels dragged out. Clearly, something’s wrong there.
It has some powerful moments, but I didn’t care enough.
Rating: 6.5 out of 10 (Slightly Better Than “Meh”)
