‘Causeway’: Toronto Review

Dir: Lila Neugebauer. US. 2022. 92 mins.

Causeway, produced by and starring Jennifer Lawrence, is a small story about two damaged people whose lives connect in a broken-down New Orleans. Much like their characters, the film tentatively comes to life when war veteran Rachel (Lawrence) starts to trust in garage owner James (Brian Tyree Henry). They bring out the best of each other, and the film.

A sound prospect to spend some time with

This stripped-down odd-couple story is set in a New Orleans conceived by legendary production designer Jack Fisk and directed by theatre’s Lila Neigebauer, making her debut. Backed by A24 and with Apple TV on board for global rights, it’s a film with an impressive pedigree which is, on paper, successful before it even gets off the starting block. Although it always feels like a beat off delivering fully on all that promise, Causeway is a solid home viewing prospect, boosted by press attention for the Oscar-winning Lawrence’s reappearance in a film which is reminiscent of that which shot her to fame, 1990’s Winter’s Bone.

The talented Lawrence clearly relishes the opportunity to play a war veteran recovering from catastrophic injuries. Her character Rachel is mute for the first part as she tries to regain her bodily functions following an explosion in Afghanistan. She has suffered a brain haemmorage and, nursed by Jane Houdyshell’s no-nonsense widow, slowly comes back to movement, if not quite life.  Unable to redeploy until she is certified fit, she is forced to return to New Orleans, and a home she despises. There, she starts work as a pool cleaner, meets equally damaged garage owner James (Henry), and avoids engagement with her mother (an under-used Linda Emond). 

Rachel would seem to be suffering from PTSD, something she denies, although her doctor is insistent. Throughout this small story of two people whose lives connect, she’s medicated: drained, flat, exhausted. Her silence, her controlled delivery, Lawrence’s deliberate under-playing of some emotional dialogue, can work, but it can also slip the film over into feeling stilted, until she sparks off Henry. Rachel mourns a brother lost to drugs, and her mother is boozy and unreliable, so when she meets James her instinct is to pull back from his promise of friendship - and desire for more than that. (She is, she tells him, a lesbian.)

Neugebauer strives for authenticity with her main character. Physically, the slight Lawrence doesn’t seem right for a military veteran, even if Rachel was supposedly a water engineer in Afghanistan, but the actor relishes the challenge to depict someone recovering from both a catastrophic brain damage and the type of unspecified emotional wreckage that has left her to flee home, never to return.  

As a contrast to Rachel, Henry’s James burns bright in his torment — for the loss of a limb, a nephew, and a sister. And New Orleans itself, as delivered by Fisk (whose work with Terrence Malik has embodied the natural), is arresting in its green, tentacled decadence as Rachel moves between her decaying home and the lush pools of the rich and absent. On the streets, the poverty of their circumstances is palpable - you have to believe that life is so bad here for Rachel that she’d prefer to return to the front-line than stay. Causeway doesn’t always convince here - why does she work as a minimum-wage pool cleaner, for example, if she was top of her class? - but it’s clear that life is very limited for thouse surrounding her.

Slight, at 90 minutes including credits, Causeway, with its status as a Gala Presentation in Toronto, was clearly conceived as a smaller affair than the noise around it might suggest. (It has no score, for example.) The work of Granik, or Kelly Reichardt, seems to be clearly an inspiration. The unfolding of this unusual friendship, however, and Henry’s lively performance against Lawrence and their resulting rapport, make it a sound prospect to spend some quiet time with.