Causeway: Damaged-People-Find-Each-Other Drama Unrolls Slowly with Rich Performances
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B
When we first meet Lynsey (Jennifer Lawrence) in first-time feature director Lila Neugebauer’s melancholy PTSD drama Causeway, she seems catatonic.
Her performance is wordless for the first few minutes as a therapist tries to get her to dress, leading to a clumsy attempt to brush her teeth that leaves toothpaste on her face.
The ex-Army Corps of Engineers worker, who’d been rocked by an IED explosion in Afghanistan, is clearly wounded and trying to recover. But Causeway is less about physical wounds than mental ones.
Brian Tyree Henry and Jennifer Lawrence meet and soon trade trauma stories.
A list of movies with PTSD themes, from returning veterans to victims of childhood trauma, would be a long read indeed. Causeway - named for the 39 km double-bridge link to New Orleans over Lake Pontchartrain where one of the movie’s key tragic events occurred – lays its cards on the table early.
Lynsey is in hometown New Orleans, back in a home she’d practically fled from, living with her often-tipsy mom (Linda Emond). Her desperation to leave again and go anywhere, even Afghanistan, has her determined to get her strength and coordination back – a goal deemed unlikely by her neurologist (Stephen McKinley Henderson).
Still, she throws herself into a job as a pool cleaner, and gets closer and closer to touching her nose on a first try.
Happenstance being what it is, Lynsey’s car breaks down one day, right in front of a shabby garage run by the one-legged James (Brian Tyree Henry). He quietly takes charge of her car problems and they very subtly begin a relationship based on the holes in their respective lives.
To be clear, nothing very much happens externally in Causeway. It is a movie where events are on a replay loop in characters’ heads (though it doesn’t resort to graphic depictions of same). It’s bold to make a film like Causeway these days. Wounded-people-find-each-other films have worked, from 1962’s David and Lisa to another Lawrence film, 2012’s Silver Linings Playbook. But where the latter had loud humour to fall back on, Causeway meanders on one mood, fueled by Linsey and James’ shared curiosity of the others’ trauma. This they do over beers, pot and the occasional trespass in a clients’ pool.
As I say, nothing much happens other than a few reveals and minor redemptions that simply flesh out what we knew already. But that sets the table for Lawrence and Henry to, y’know, act. It’s one thing to act when your character is active. When you have to forge an onscreen relationship entirely and subtly through expressions and pauses, that almost seems like a lost art.
In its rambling pace, Causeway at times is reminiscent of Winter’s Bone, the 2010 movie that introduced Lawrence to film fans, and may still be her finest performance. In Causeway, the doctors aren’t the only ones wondering what’s going on inside her head. The audience does too, and she reveals it as slowly as she needs to.
Ending-wise, Causeway is not a pat film. It’s simply a story of two lonely people, whose relationship and lives will probably never be simple.
Causeway. Directed by Lila Neugebauer. Starring Jennifer Lawrence, Brian Tyree Henry and Linda Emond. Begins screening Friday, November 4 on Apple TV+.