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GALVESTON
Director: Mélanie Laurent Cast: Ben Foster, Elle Fanning, Beau Bridges, Adepero Oduye, María Valverde, Tinsley Price, Anniston Price, Lili Reinhart MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:31 Release Date: 10/19/18 (limited) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 18, 2018 Two very good performances are at the heart of Galveston, the story of two lost and desperate souls, whose lives become intertwined through violence. He makes a living on it. She has been a victim of it for about as long as she can remember. There's little reason that these two should meet. They do by chance, though, and after that, their link is both as tenuous as their hold on life and as inescapable as their futures. The screenplay, written by Jim Hammett and based on Nic Pizzolatto's novel, possesses the premise of a thriller, but its methods and intentions have little to do with the particulars of a plot. The film is more about loneliness, despair, and how those feelings can keep people apart or bring them together in sudden, unexpected ways. Most relationships have to be earned. This one is almost akin to a family, in how the bond is instantaneous. When one's life is on the line, trust is not a tightly held commodity, to be taken and given with any considerable consideration. Here, the trust between these two characters is immediate and unspoken. The plot is about as familiar as such a story can be, in which a hitman goes on a job that turns out to be a setup to kill him. Roy (Ben Foster) is the professional killer, an enforcer for a local crime lord (played by Beau Bridges). Roy lives alone in a shack on the Louisiana bayou, where he spends his evenings drinking until he passes out. The job has something to do with some papers that the boss wants. The betrayal comes from the boss himself—something to do with a woman. He saves himself in a firefight and, after a moment's hesitation, frees Rocky (Elle Fanning), an independent sex worker who was caught up in the scheme. Roy's plan is to get as far out of town as possible. They grab a bunch of drinks to take the edge off, and Roy dismisses Rocky's offer to give him anything he wants for free. Along the way, Rocky stops to pick up her 3-year-old sister (played by Tinsley and Anniston Price) and get some money from their abusive father. There's a gunshot, but Rocky insists that she only shot at a wall to scare her father. From there, with the police possibly looking for them now—in addition to Roy's boss—the three make their way from Louisiana to Galveston, Texas, and make a temporary home at a motel. From that point until its climax, the film abandons its thriller trappings and becomes a study of how these characters—as unlikely as the pairing may be—need each other. Roy is 40 and apparently dying from lung cancer (He still defiantly smokes like a chimney), and Rocky is 19 and the survivor of seemingly endless abuse. Hammett and director Mélanie Laurent ignore or flat-out dismiss any easy classification of the characters' relationship. There's nothing romantic or sexual about their bond, and there's not even a hint that Rocky sees Roy as a surrogate father (Considering what she knows of fathers, this makes perfect sense). As for how Roy sees Rocky, it's definitely not as a daughter, because he has never known such a bond. It's close, though, in that he wants to protect her and seems more terrified about putting her in danger than by being in danger himself. The bond is much deeper—almost existentially fundamental. Only they can understand it, and even then, that understanding is vague. Foster plays Roy as a man of few words, who probably feels what's between them deeply. He simply possesses neither the means nor the desire to express it. Fanning plays Rocky as a young woman who puts on a good act of being naïve and childish (a "baby doll," as Roy refers to the gimmick), but beneath it is years of suffering in silence. This might be the first time in a long while—if ever—that either of them has talked about the past, the pain, and the feeling that all has been and mostly remains hopeless. It also might be the first time that hope has come into their vernacular—even if the word remains unsaid. Roy definitely didn't talk such things with his ex (played by Adepero Oduye), whom he visits to get some reassurance. Instead, he receives a blunt reminder of the sort of man he was and might still be: an unreliable ex-convict with a history of and a predilection for violence. After all, it's his life that put Rocky in this situation, and he abandons Rocky and her sister, when they need him most, to make the trip to see the ex. The thriller elements eventually return, which is to be expected. They're benefited by having spent so much time with these characters and coming to understand them, but the re-emergence of the mostly forgotten plot also coldly and unceremoniously discards the film's central relationship, in a move that almost seems cruel. That's the point, of course, but the revelation turns these characters and this relationship into an exploitative plot point. They deserve better. Even so, there's a lot to admire about everything that comes before and after the climactic sequence of Galveston (For her part, Laurent stages a dynamic, one-take scene of stealthy escape to distract us from what has unfolded immediately beforehand). The bond between Roy and Rocky may be surprising and short, but like the pain that brought them together, it lingers. Copyright © 2018 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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