Oftentimes, you can get a sense for a film upon the opening scenes, and when a film has that elusive “It” factor, you absolutely can sense it. Causeway, from debuting director Lila Neugebauer, absolutely has it. At a surprisingly short runtime of only 1h 32m, the film delivers on so much characterization within an extremely powerful story and very believable performances and had me watching intently at every scene trying to learn more, see more, and feel more.
Causeway opens with a fantastic opening shot showing our main character Lynsey (Jennifer Lawrence in what could be her best performance yet) being picked up from the hospital. This opening shot is absolutely gorgeous, and echoes the simplistic yet very real and grounded cinematography of Diego Garcia, along with amazing set design that makes it feel like I am watching someone’s real life story unfold. We learn slowly that Lawrence is a military vet who was injured in Afghanistan and is now relearning her whole life through physical and cognitive therapy. She moves back home with her mother Gloria (Linda Emond) and meets local mechanic James (Brian Tyree Henry in another career defining role). Lynsey struggles to come to terms with her new normal while trying to recover and get back overseas to serve.
When we open, we know hardly anything about the characters. What I appreciate the most about this film is we learn its details along with the characters. We don’t know what’s going on with the story, what happened or even who the characters and it works really well. It is also amplified by fantastic performances by Lawrence and Henry, who I believe should both be up for best actor/actress nominations during this year’s award season. The amount of nuance to each character they give and their ability to present the characters so believably elevates this film to a whole new level, and it needs it.
At its core, this is a film without a main conflict. There isn’t much that even happens in terms of story. Yet the entire time I was glued to my screen watching it because of the performances. These two, along with the rest of the cast (especially Jayne Houdyshell as Nurse Sharon and Stephen Mckinley Henderson as Dr. Lucas, they were fantastic here too in minor roles) were really great. This is how you do a wholly character driven story. I’m looking at you Three Thousand Years of Longing. I do very much wish we got to see more of the opening scenes with Nurse Sharon, and I felt as though we could have had so much more story in this section of the film. There could have been an extra 20+ minutes added here and still kept the runtime below 2 hours, and I would’ve enjoyed it just the same.
In this film, we also deal with all sorts of different modern day issues: we have a character suffering from PTSD and brain injuries, a disabled person with no leg, a deaf character and a lesbian character. Of all of these things, I can appreciate how candidly they are navigated through. When these things are brought up within the story, there’s no massive scene of a huge revelation like “WOW this person likes women” or “Look, this person has no leg”. It’s all handled candidly, as if to say “Yes this exists, it’s not a big deal, let’s keep it moving.” I really appreciated that, and thought it worked extremely well within the confines of the film.
I also want to point out how moving and well done the sound and score are. Almost entirely throughout Causeway, music is used to queue a sort of turning point for our main character, or an emotional moment of some kind. However, what I really loved here was the absence of music. If you pay attention, 80% of this movie has no score, it’s all the sounds of what’s happening on the screen interspersed with silence. I thought this was incredibly smart and the use of music became extremely important as the film developed.
Final Thoughts
There are 3 types of movies that I can only watch one time: One that is so bad that it doesn’t even warrant repeat viewings, one that is good enough to enjoy, but not something I would go out of my way enough to watch a second time, and one that is so good yet so emotionally powerful and draining that I couldn’t watch it a second time if I wanted to. Luckily, Causeway falls into that third category, and it may just have jumped into my top 3 favorite films of 2022 because of it.
