Don’t call it a comeback: Jennifer Lawrence in “Causeway”

To be clear, Jennifer Lawrence did take some time off to pursue educating herself about corruption in politics, COVID-19 (like the rest of us), and to pull back from overexposure, but was she really gone? 

She left her representation at CAA because she discovered her agent was not passing along good scripts and she was tired of being pitched blockbusters and work that just wasn’t very interesting to her. However, I don’t know if she’s aware of this but for every “Passengers”, she’s done a “Hereditary”, or a “Joy”, or even a “Don’t Look Up”. None of these are exactly status quo, middle-of-the-world, or uninteresting. 

I get it, though, now; she wants to return to more intimate human scale dramas, and “Causeway” is very much that. In a significant way, it serves as a bookend or an antiphonal response to “Winter Bone”, if less desperate and stark. In both, Lawrence plays a woman stripped of, well, just about everything. 

In the work at hand, she plays Lynsey, a returning medic recovering from brain trauma from an IED blast in Afghanistan, who in returning to move in with her mother and back in her hometown, is doing her best to come to terms with the past as much as her present. Part of the return entails getting a job to help out and to expedite her return to active service (which is repeatedly warned against by her physician). 

The job she gets is cleaning pools. It’s undemanding and gives her time to herself, which is pretty much all she wants. Out of the gate, though, the truck she uses to get to the job breaks down and she meets James, the ever amazing Bryan Tyree Henry, the owner of the garage who in turn gives her a lift. From here, “Causeway” becomes one of the best two-handers in recent years.

When you put two actors together who can disappear into their respective roles and produce something genuinely organic like this, it’s a true cause for celebration. Neither role is particularly flashy; these are quiet lives, slightly desperate, but not without wit and affection. There is no great flare-up, no melodrama; there is simply two people in search of connection.

James lost his leg in an accident that killed his daughter and destroyed the relationship with the girl’s mother. Lynsey comes along and two damaged people navigate trust and what to share with the other. As you can tell, there isn’t much in the way of a plot to go into, and this is refreshing.

We don’t get enough genuine character studies or films that revolve around the small things in life. We also don’t get enough of actors given enough space to explore and discover the depths of lives led quietly and out of the glare of the tumult of either major issues or explosions (emotional or CGI). Sure, there is conflict here between Lynsey and her mother, between Lynsey and James, between Lynsey and her doctor; but all of it is subtle and handled filmed through an unsparing lens. 

There are no overly emotional moments that tug at the heart; the entire movie is that and the effect is cumulative. It wasn’t until after the film ends that I realized how touching and satisfying this small piece of intimacy was. 

Astonishingly, this is theater director Lila Neugebauer’s first feature (and only her fourth credit on IMDB). She moves us through Lynsey’s life at just the right pace, nothing is hurried but nothing is lingered over, either. I suspect “Causeway” would make an excellent theater piece, but it works as a piece of cinema quite handily. 

Interestingly, having said all that, it isn’t stagebound and that owes much to cinematographer Diego Garcia, whose work on Apichatapong Weeraasethakul’s “Cemetery of Splendor” delighted me no end and whose shooting on “Tokyo Vice” deserves to be seen (go watch it now…Michael Mann is back!) Garcia approaches the piece with the same kind of measured shots he used in Weerasethakul’s work, along with a muted palette and a sense of existing in a world that transitions from the dull reality of recovery and healing to the genuinely miraculous aspect of the same, with two friends discovering each other and making their ways together to some sense of wholeness.

All of this is tricky on a good day, but with three script writers (and I think this is their first work for film), it’s a seamless execution. The dialog comes across as authentic and the back and forth between Lynsey and James is especially free of “cuteness”; but the movie makes room for silence and space for the characters to breathe. 

I don’t know that this would fit everyone’s idea of a major work but in terms of what Lawrence is going for, it is a mission statement. This is the first production from her Excellent Cadaver Productions; it was filmed in 2019, but delayed owing to the pandemic, and if it’s any indication, they’ll be putting out some pretty worthwhile material.

On a related note, it strikes me that Lawrence isn’t alone; there are a number of actresses forming their own production companies (Millie Bobby Brown, Alicia Vikander, Charlize Theron, and Margot Robbie among others). My assumption is that it’s a matter of taking greater control over their careers and not being at the mercy of other producers in terms of what projects they wind up in. This is not a necessarily new development (there were women producers and woman run studios during the silent era; that is until they were bought out or driven out of business by, oh, the brothers Warner, Louis Mayer, Sam Goldwyn and others…not pointing fingers…yes, of course I am) but over the past one hundred years or so, let’s face it, representation and holding any kind of power has not been easy for women in film. 

Hopefully, both the fact that more women are entering the production process at higher levels means we will be getting a broader range of stories. In fact, we’ve already seen some remarkable tales told; “I, Tonya”, “Gone Girl”, “Ugly Betty”, “Web Therapy”, “Atomic Blonde” all point to the variety and quality of what to look forward to. And now, “Causeway” as well.