In “You Were Never Really Here” Joaquin Phoenix continues his dogged campaign to be our crustiest actor.
Nothing tops his disheveled turn as “Joaquin Phoenix” in the similarly titled pseudo-documentary “I’m Not Here,” of course — that will remain the gold standard for an actor trashing his own good looks — but Phoenix looks remarkably awful in this new thriller, for which he won the Best Actor prize at the Cannes Film Festival last year.
His hired killer is a pot-bellied, nest-haired wreck, thus raising the question: Is cultivating the “gutter-sleeping hobo” look really the best way for a hit man to slip in and out of dicey situations? Director Lynne Ramsay has suggested that her goal was to upend our expectations of the smooth, sleek professional assassin. If so, she and Phoenix have succeeded.
They’ve succeeded in other ways, too, because “You Were Never Really Here” casts a hypnotic spell. The movie’s opening moments mystify us: piercing sounds, garish colors, the intuition of a violent incident.
This is consistent with Ramsay’s bold style, but it’s also the world as experienced by Phoenix’s character, Joe, whose grungy existence may be haunted by wartime experiences and his own childhood trauma. I say “may be” because there’s much about the movie we have to guess at.
Ramsay, the Scots director of “Ratcatcher” and “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” scatters story information like tea leaves at the bottom of a cup, so it actually takes a while just to understand that Joe is indeed a hit man, and not a free-floating creep.
The movie’s fractured approach disguises the familiarity of the plot (drawn from Jonathan Ames’ book): A hired gun gets involved with dangerous and politically-connected people, violates his professional code when the gig goes awry, and pays the price.
On this job, Joe liberates an adolescent girl (Ekaterina Samsonov) in a sequence rendered partly with grainy closed-circuit cameras — a tour de force of suspense. Joe does his work with a hammer, not a gun, and Ramsay spares us little of the subsequent skull-cracking violence.
We’re so far inside Joe’s head that other characters tend to be blurry impressions, although Judith Roberts — amazingly, the mystery woman who lives across the hall in David Lynch’s “Eraserhead”— is memorable as Joe’s mother.
The jagged cutting and nerve-plucking soundtrack (including Jonny Greenwood’s music) make the film a sensation-crammed haunted house, which is one reason to be grateful it clocks in at less than 90 minutes. Phoenix is in complete sync with Ramsay’s cryptic style — he slugs through the action as though bearing the weight of a thousand unspoken guilts.
For all its 21st-century techno-sheen, “You Were Never Really Here” has moments straight from a Hollywood Western, and it isn’t a stretch to say that things still come down to a character deciding that “a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” (I never could understand why people mock that phrase: It’s a lucid moral imperative, and a solid storytelling sentiment — suitable for either sex.)
You’ll know exactly where that moment comes in this film, and as difficult and inscrutable as Joe is, you’ll be right there with him.
‘You Were Never Really Here’ (3½ stars)
Joaquin Phoenix plays a grungy hired killer in this fractured, violent, hypnotic film from director Lynne Ramsay. The movie’s style is so vivid, you might not noticed the story follows a familiar formula — and Phoenix, who looks remarkably awful, is certainly not the usual leading man.
Rating: R, for violence, language
Opening: SIFF Cinema Uptown
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