Ain’t Them Bodies Saints

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.