Ain't Them Bodies Saints Reviews

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since there was a pretty cool cast involved, I was quite eager to check it out. First of all, it was definitely one of the best titles I ever came across (in fact, it doesn’t mean anything and it has no link with the movie itself, it’s just a random sentence David Lowery wanted to use as a movie title) and I loved the poster as well so that was definitely a promising start. Well, I always had a weak spot for Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck, together they had a lot of chemistry and made a very charismatic couple. Concerning the rest of the movie, it was pretty obvious that Lowery had been inspired by Terrence Malick’s work which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, it was visually pretty neat and I really enjoyed the ephemeral poetic mood. However, it is also had most of the drawbacks from Malick’s peculiar approach to filmmaking. Above all, there was eventually very little attention given to the plot. Indeed, it was pretty much an excuse to separate these two characters in order to reach a seriously doomed love story. As a result, you don’t get any details on how the actual robbery went down or on how Bob Muldoon actually managed to escape from jail which was obviously intentional but what we got instead was never really fascinating, I’m afraid. Another issue was that, while this couple was always interesting to behold, even if they were in fact not together for most of the duration, I didn’t care much for any of the supporting characters. The fact that none of them was developed whatsoever probably didn’t help. Anyway, to conclude, even if not everything did work in this movie, there was still something quite spellbinding about this couple and I think the damned thing is worth a look, especially if you like the genre. 

Less a film on its own merits than it is something engineered to feel like a relic from Hollywood’s revolutionary period between 1967 and 1982. Does it succeed? Well, that’s more of a volatile question, isn’t it? Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is a gorgeous ode to a bygone Americana, but it’s limp as romance and dubious as a western.

Simply put, there’s just not much incentive to care about the central couple. We meet them as outlaws, but they’re soon parted. They remain away from each other for the remainder of the film, but we’re led to believe that they have an intense, passionate love affair that’s prone to explosive outbursts of violence and criminality. Since we only view them as existing separately, there’s no evidence or reason to buy in on the strength of their emotional connection. A similar problem undercut Cold Mountain’s pining lovers.

Director David Lowery and cinematographer Bradford Young craft a series of stylistically pleasing but ultimately emotional series of images. There’s no soul to Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, just a successive parade of ghostly images that suffocate what little bits of life and vibrancy there was under the weight of their self-imposed importance. It ends up feeling like a pastiche of films like Bonnie and Clyde, Borderlands, and the like.

It seems more obsessed with a crafting a twangy, fiddle-heavy sense of western folklore and poetry, both of which are either too heavy-handed or flattened to pull off the stunt, then it does with telling a compelling narrative. Rooney Mara’s rendered a saintly mother figure, Casey Affleck is a jailbird romantic on a personal odyssey, and the whole thing is so picturesque that it ends up being a pastiche of its influences rather than a natural outgrowth of them. Lowery’s clearly talented, but he needs to let his work breathe instead of crafting laminated paper dolls propped against sepia photographs of the vast plains of Texas.