Maren (Taylor Russell) is a soft-spoken teenager with too few friends living a fairly hardscrabble, impermanent life in Maryland with her father (André Holland) in the late 1980s. When a violent outburst from the newly of-age Maren constitutes the final straw for her dad’s willingness to care for her, the attentive but fed-up man departs, leaving the young woman with only an envelope of cash, her birth certificate and a taped confessional. Maren takes to a Greyhound bus, firstly to try and track down her mother, who she’s never met, but moreover to make sense of her appetite for human flesh, colliding with various capital-C characters, shady and friendly alike, along the way.
The idea of Bones and All, aesthetically and conceptually, is quite appealing. The film is cause for the reunion of director Luca Guadagnino and Timothée Chalamet, collaborators on the beloved 2017 queer coming-of-age film Call Me by Your Name; Russell is a fabulous burgeoning talent, turning in impressive work in films like Trey Edward Shults’s undervalued, excellent 2019 family melodrama Waves. Bones and All is also enticing as a Southern (or maybe Midwestern, as it begins in Maryland and traverses across Ohio, Tennessee, Indiana and Kentucky) gothic, with its old-South architecture — all decaying trim and seedy living rooms — rotting away. While the film is, at baseline, watchable and enjoyable, it never quite amounts to more than the sum of its component parts, playing out as tantalizing loose ends that never fully congeal.
Russell does great work in the lead role. In accordance with what the part demands, her face simultaneously has the sunken-eyed look of someone who’s bore witness to (and outright been the perpetrator of) some heinous things yet also carries a profoundly childlike innocence in her disposition. There is a straight-on shot of the actor in a diner scene that is unsettling in its expression of this uneasy contrast. Chalamet, on the other hand, fairs less well. As Lee, a fellow drifter with the same unfortunate dietary requirements as Maren, he certainly looks the part — his costuming delightfully includes a puka shell necklace and a makeshift shoelace belt holding up his baggy, ripped jeans, to say nothing of his pink-highlighted brunette locks. But Chalamet’s presence onscreen is inert, due to the fact that he comes off too noticeably aware of the camera’s presence and forcing a sense of put-on attempted naturalism. There’s nothing of the sprightly, intensely physical energy he brought to Call Me by Your Name here; just stilted posing and laconic mumbles.
Guadagnino’s direction is similarly challenged in places, but it isn’t all false — there is a visual economy to Bones and All that is striking. The film’s diced-up editing style (courtesy of Marco Costa) is prone to insert shots that teem with physical details, like an unforgettable late-in-film image of drool and mucus dripping uncontrollably. Sometimes these shots speak for the characters and then are reinforced unnecessarily through dialogue, as when Maren and sinister, drawling loner Sully (Mark Rylance), victimize a sick woman and the camera cuts to photographs of the helpless corpse’s loved ones. Later on, Maren relays to Lee the guilt she feels when she considers the webs of familial ties that their victims leave behind, but at this point DP Arseni Khachaturan’s choices have already rendered the exchange unnecessary.
Maren’s outpouring additionally fails to resonate because it’s never entirely clear whether Guadagnino and company are trying to make a cold, hollowed-out account of the way this kind of lifestyle erodes the soul as Claire Denis captured in 2001’s Trouble Every Day, or a lovers on the run paean to the secret beauty of the Middle American backwoods. There are one too many narrative turns that hinge on conveniences and emotional reveals that don’t land as they should, ultimately feeling like the film’s trajectory is off-center and not having the impacts at which it’s aiming. Even the score, by the usually reliable Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and made up of reverb-y guitar wailing, doesn’t land.
One wonders whether this sense of unexacting, mismatched tones is partly due to Bones and All’s status as Guadagnino’s first U.S.-set outing, providing, as the horrendous Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri did for Martin McDonagh, a European director’s skewed and imprecise vision of the States. But while the filmmaker’s outsider status does perhaps prevent him from mining, for instance, the racial tension of how Maren’s identity as a Black woman in America compounds the isolation and loneliness she already feels because of her condition, it does also allow him to shoot and depict the film’s events with an unfamiliarity that can be haunting.
Though obviously taking elements from the romance and horror genres, Bones and All is most trenchant as a road movie, a series of loosely connected incidents where two lost souls compellingly wander through interestingly mundane locations and cycle through new acquaintances. It’s a journey littered with various sorta-period-specific cultural artifacts — books by Tolkein and Joyce, a Kiss poster — but the fact that the meaning of their inclusion or relationship to one another is elusive is emblematic of the movie’s broader lack of cohesion.
Photo courtesy of United Artists Releasing
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