“This Happened in Texas,” states the title card of Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, before you see anything else (in fact there are no opening credits, so that’s the only graphic you get at all) and it’s a damn good thing. Without that piece of exposition, it would be tough to get your bearings. Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is so awesomely sharp and single-minded that it often forgets to set us in a time or place, to let us know how much time has passed between events or give us any visual cues w/r/t the space around its characters. Actually, “forgets” is the wrong word, since it suggests that director David Lowery doesn’t know what he’s doing. Untrue. This is actually one of the most self-assured films I’ve seen in a while, exuding a confidence in the telling that is severely lacking in cinema these days.
The film centers on Bob and Ruth, a young couple who are deeply, deeply in love but can hardly make ends meet. Bob attempts to solve this through petty crime and bank robbing, which Ruth reluctantly goes along with (“I don’t wanna go to jail,” is the third sentence we hear out of her mouth, just before, “I’m pregnant”). Bob’s psyched about the latter news; it (the news) does, however, present them with even further financial burden, which leads to a much heavier crime that leads to a shoot-out which lands Bob in jail. So Ruth has the baby alone, Bob counts his days in prison—he tries to escape five times—while keeping in touch with her through letters, and all the while she waits. Eventually their daughter is four, and it’s right around this fourth birthday that Bob escapes successfully. The remainder of the film focuses on Bob’s attempts to get back to Ruth, and every single other character’s attempts to stop him.
If this sounds like some sort of Nicholas Sparksian love story, then I’m not doing my job very well. This isn’t the story of lovers torn apart by circumstance and their belief that their love can overcome etc etc. This is the story, very simply, of a man who has one goal in mind, one thing and one thing only to live for, and he goes and does it, no questions asked. It’s also the story of a woman who tries to wait as best she can, but has a daughter to raise and a nice local police officer who’d gladly alleviate her burden.
And it’s also the story of the men who try to keep them apart, which men are probably the most interesting characters in the film. This is partly because their motives for keeping these two apart are completely justified—they care about Ruth, know Bob isn’t a dependable person, and at least Skerritt, a local owner of a gun shop, is keenly aware of the kind of people who might hunt Bob down once they find out where he is. Officer Wheeler has a thing for Ruth, so you might think his motives are selfish, but actually he takes his time courting her, and even admits that he’s got nothing against Bob—which is pretty big of him, since he thinks Bob shot him.
I focus on what happens, rather than on the visuals or its themes, because the film puts what “happens” front and center. There are no subplots, few supporting characters, and nary an extra minute of film. There is one, single, very clear goal, and a finite number of obvious, tangible obstacles. There’s almost zero exposition (hence the inability to get your bearings mentioned above), Ruth’s pregnancy for instance being told in a series of Bob’s letters, the length of her hair changing, and a quick birth scene in ECU of her pained expression. Almost the entire film is shot in either close-ups or two shots; it consciously avoids the sprawling, open-air establishing shots so common of Ford-style westerns. It’s a simple story, simply told.
That allows the performances to do most of the telling. And the performances, like the film itself, are understated, subtle and muted so that there’s about a hundred times more being suggested than told. Wheeler asks Ruth whether she knows where the escaped Bob is and she says, “No. He won’t come for me, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’ll do whatever I can to help you but he won’t come find me.” Rooney Mara, as Ruth, manages to convince the cops of this statement while simultaneously convincing us that she doesn’t believe it herself, that she’s actually just waiting out the clock until he gets back. Mara is (here, as always) impossible not to watch, Emily Blunt-like in her looks but with a husky southern accent that lets you know she can take care of herself, and gets you to understand why every man in the movie is so interested in looking after her. Casey Affleck, as Bob, is fine but has little to do, though he brings a great deal of his leftover Western outlawhood from The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford to this role, bringing the performance to a new level in a scene where he hitchhikes and talks to his ride about family. Ben Foster’s pretty much unrecognizable as Wheeler, and does a good line in double-edged aw-shucks-ness, convincingly showing it as the other side of the coin from his ability to (for instance) shoot a dude in the face without thinking much of it.
Keith Carradine as Skerritt benefits from the most interesting role, and the two most interesting scenes. One involves the men who are looking for Bob, walking in to the gun shop as Skerritt does his best to ignore them—it’s a lesson in the building of tension and suspense. The other is his face off with Bob himself, a dark (both visually and thematically) standoff made all the darker because there aren’t any bad guys in the room, just two people whose motives we completely understand, and completely agree with.
Ultimately, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints ends up being a film that makes every other film you watch look expository and over-produced by comparison. Reviews that have called it slow are ludicrous—this is probably the best-paced film of the year. It’s spare in its parts, and that’s just another reason to love it. It’s refreshing to see a not-a-lot film in a year of too-much.
About Ted McLoof
Ted McLoof is a writer at Rookerville and teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Gertrude, Monkeybicycle, Sonora Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, The Associative Press, and elsewhere.He's recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. He is very cool and very handsome and he'd like to buy you a drink.