Mark Reviews Movies: CAUSEWAY

Causeway, A24/Apple Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 3, 2022

The old adage is that you can't go home again, but for the characters in Causeway, home has never left them. That's true of Lynsey (Jennifer Lawrence), a member of the Army Corps of Engineers who is wounded while on a mission in Afghanistan. She is put on mandatory, indefinite medical leave, and with nowhere else to go, Lysney ends up in the house of her childhood—the place she had wanted to leave for most of her life. Whatever happened in that house has stuck with her.

For better and for worse, a lot of that past pain is left unspoken and only suggested by Ottessa Moshfegh, Luke Goebel, and Elizabeth Sanders' screenplay. For the better, the movie doesn't need to delve into the specifics of Lynsey's emotional and psychological trauma, because the mere fact of it is enough to get across the point. After all, she's currently dealing with a different kind of trauma: the brain injury that has left her with limited mobility, motor functions, and memory when we first meet her.

Lynsey went through that. She goes through a period of at-home care and the intensive physical therapy in order literally and figurative get back on her feet. Even after the terror of the attack that wounded her and that phase of relative helplessness, she would rather risk a relapse, a compounding of her injury, or some new kind of horror in returning to military service than to return to her childhood home in New Orleans. That says a lot about what Lynsey simply won't say.

The downside, of course, is that the silence restricts this character—both her development and our ability to understand what she's experiencing at any given moment. Lawrence's performance is left to do a lot of heavy lifting in making the most of those moments of quiet reflection and pain, and the actor's communication of those qualities, as well as the mental and physical struggles of the character, go a long way toward making Lynsey instantly and continually sympathetic.

Is that enough to carry this story, though? To be fair to the screenwriters and director Lila Neugebauer, the movie isn't trying and doesn't need to do much more than to serve as a quiet, introspective character study about people—and this woman in particular—trying to live ordinary lives amidst ever-present pain and sadness.

From that description, there's obviously another character in the mix here, and he's the one does speak of his own melancholy, reflecting Lynsey's own to some degree, and serves as a sounding board for Lynsey's own, once she feels comfortable enough to vocalize as little as she does. Without this character, the movie is more of a puzzle than it needs to be and more of a one-note affair than such characters deserve.

He's James (Brian Tyree Henry), a local mechanic who meets Lynsey when her old pickup truck starts to have trouble. She just got a job cleaning pools in the wealthy parts of town, which is sort of a necessity. That's not only to earn some money and prove that she's physically capable of returning to active service. It's also to get out of the house, as well as to keep some distance between herself and her mother Gloria (Linda Emond), who tries to spend some time with her daughter but whom Lynsey resents for reasons that vaguely become somewhat clearer as the story progresses.

Lynsey and James start spending time together, because neither really has anything better to do and both seem to have some sense that they share some understanding of old wounds that won't subside. Henry is great here as James, showing deep wells of vulnerability and sadness at every turn. His injury, a prosthetic leg, is more visible than Lynsey's, but like her, it takes some time and some trust for him to open up about how he lost his leg—and what else he lost as a result from those circumstances, leaving him to live alone a big house with a history.

Much of the movie simply watches these two characters together, discussing feelings of loneliness and aching in general, while talking around the specifics of their own. The screenplay is smart to keep the relationship platonic (Lynsey lets James know she's attracted to women, just so he doesn't get any wrong ideas—although the script also contrives some unnecessary conflict by briefly breaking what seems to be its only rule about this bond). A romance might overly simplify the story's ideas about healing and reconciliation, because so much of the reconciling here is internal, and besides, their connection isn't about love or sex. It's about sharing the feeling of having lost love or feeling as if love might never have been there in the first place.

The snag here is that these two characters need each other in terms of drama, too. The central dynamic, which allows James to be open and honest while Lynsey stays shut off, comes to depend on the two co-existing for the emotional truth and ideas of Causeway to stay in focus. On her own, as she comes to be more of as the story moves along, Lynsey is intriguing but can only move so far and reveal so much, and that's too much to movie's detriment.

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