You Were Never Really Here

Spoilers!!!!

Writer/director Lynne Ramsay's YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE has a title that just about describes the movie itself.  It was as if I watched a series of half realized events and then it just ended.  Not so much ambiguous, just unfocused.  What the hell was that all about?  Do I sound clueless? Like I didn't get it?  I may sound embarrassingly goofy and to you my thoughts may reek of lazy film criticism, but damned if that's not how I felt.  I was never engaged, always at arm's length from this one.  For a story of such urgency with a thoughtful, patient analysis of a possibly irrevocably damaged human being, I found it curiously uninvolving.  One hopes that Jonathan Ames' novel of the same name achieves something clearer.

Joaquin Phoenix is Joe, a highly troubled ex-military and ex-Fed who makes a living rescuing underage girls sold into sex trafficking.  He lives with/cares for his elderly mother in NYC.   His current assignment is to find the daughter of a senator, who is well aware of Joe's brutal methods and wants him to inflict as much violence on the captors as possible.   The girl, Nina, has been abducted for her services in a brothel for  wealthy perverts.

Joe is successful, but then everyone starts dying.  The Feds and police seem to be in on it.  Is it all related to Joe's accidental appearance to the son of his middleman, the go-between for Joe and his handler? Ramsay's movie isn't so much concerned with such plot intrigue, though if you describe what happens in YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE, much of it sounds like a standard issue kidnap thriller.  You know, the kind Liam Neeson does.

Interspersed within this dream-like film are several moments of Joe's consideration of suicide.  There are flashbacks to his childhood, filled with abuse.  Memories as a soldier and later an FBI agent aren't any less ugly and horrifying.  The film has potent imagery, but its assemblage is messy and ineffective most of the time.  Like the art project of an eager novice who needs far more practice.

If YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE is to be an essay on the erosion of a soul in desperate need of saving ala Travis Bickle (and this movie does resemble TAXI DRIVER in some ways), Ramsay needed to work with editor Joe Bibi a bit more carefully.  Maybe she needed to call Paul Schrader, too.  Phoenix is very good as Joe, and Ramsay's scenes are mostly satisfactory to good, but it just doesn't come together.   I did like the water burial scene.

Jonny Greenwood again contributes an interesting score - sometimes eerie, sometimes almost reminiscent of an '80 genre film.  Far less successful are Ramsay's pop song choices, presumably meant to be ironic.  Charlene's ultra cheesy '70s pap "I've Never Been to Me" is played as Joe watches the man who just murdered his mother expire in a pool of blood on a kitchen floor.  Then, in one of the most dubious moments I've seen in a film lately, holds hands with the guy as they both sing along.  The final scene uses the old "If I Knew You Were Comin' (I'd Have Baked a Cake).  Adds nothing.  Like a fifth grader's idea of being funny and clever.  This may well be the most overrated film of 2018.