Blue Ruin

The guy is a vagrant, with little money, grabbing a bath in someone's home while they're out.  He hangs at the beach much of the day and sleeps in his rusted out car.  It is only later that we learn his name is Dwight, and that long ago both his parents were murdered by a guy named Wade Cleland -  who has just been released from prison.  It's been twenty years since the crime, and Dwight is ready to return to his hometown in Virginia to mete out some justice.

2013's BLUE RUIN thus far probably sounds reminiscent of many exploitation pics from the '70s and '80s.  Revenge thrillers during which we watch the victims and the tormentors switch places during a ninety minute running time.  Films designed to appeal to bloodlust, or at least the very human and understandable desire to see evil given its just desserts.  Some might say, evil for evil.  But we can always justify such actions.   Especially if we were ever a victim.

Writer/director Jeremy Saulnier is going for something different.  You might say he is attempting an essay on the terrible cycle of vengeance.  How merely dispatching the first dispatcher only leads to more dispatching.  When does it end? Will someone on either side finally put a stop to it?  See the futility? The utter depravity? How long will it take for such acknowledgement to be reached? Years? Generations?

Saulnier's direction is assured.  He has a firm visual sense.  His film is best in the silences, scenes with Dwight (Macon Blair) where he is alone, preparing for something.  The cinema achieved in these sequences is impressive.  The exposition is sparse, necessarily so.  The movie gets down to business quickly, yet patiently.  Fewer words.  It's a reminder that the mere presence of (excessive) dialogue does not a great film make.  We get all the information needed.  When we finally get some explanation of what really happened all those years ago, the film temporarily becomes a little less interesting, even as the whole notion of black and white retribution is nicely complicated, and ripe for post viewing discussion.

Blair, who grew up with the director, is fine in the lead.  Dwight's a bit of a cipher, curiously very willing to die at any moment.  He seems to have lost his humanity many years before.  But he feels he has a role to fulfill.  As retaliator, but also as protector of his sister Sam (Amy Hargreaves) and her children.  And he's (refreshingly) no expert with firearms, perhaps to the mild consternation of his friend Ben (Devin Ratray, quite entertaining), who loans him a rifle.  The only cast member I recognized was Eve Plumb, best known for her role as Jan on The Brady Bunch, here playing a relative of Wade's.

Those sensitive to violence are forewarned; there's some serious bloodletting at times, including an attempt to remove an arrow from a thigh.  I'm still trying to figure out why one of the Cleland clan was firing arrows at Dwight instead of say, a TEC-9.  I'm sure there is some interesting subtext there.