As a person grows older, there comes a moment that bitterly people have to accept, ‘I am not, and I will never be, Liam Neeson’ rather boldly and sadly. There that if something you love is Taken away from you – you either do not have the means to recover it or get back at whoever took it away from you in the first place, you simply lack the necessary set of skills of that particular expertise. You will probably be a pain in the ass of all professionals, or at least those who are like you.
No, the brutal fact is, when trying to get revenge how most of us are not Bryan Mills – Neeson’s ex-CIA agent, Uma Thurman’s Beatrix Kiddo, Maximus Decimus Meridius when trying to get revenge. Instead, of making classic revenge, they will be more of an ambushed Dwight in lean and mean new thriller Blue Ruin.
Sometimes Yes. Just not at first impression that one may have on the character. Dwight is introduced to us as a homeless man with wild hair who bears a resemblance to Tom Hanks off Cast Away, stealing showers in abandoned houses, scavenging for food in rubbish bins and living in a beat up, and rather disturbingly gun-holed Pontiac (the blue ruin). However this clearly fractured man is brought back to focus when it is revealed to him that Will Cleland is getting out of prison. The problem is that he intends to do it by killing Cleland for a crime that has not yet been disclosed.
One of the most overused premises in storytelling is revenge (Tarantino or Park Chan-wook with his Vengeance trilogy create whole careers based on it one way or another), And it is not far-fetched to see the reason for that. If properly executed – Munich, Dead Man’s Shoes, Old Boy to name but a few – revenge can be a rich, dark, and deep avenue of drama. More often than not however it is just a simple and cheap story motivator which is all too easily switched to grief-violence mode; slaughtering logic and people in the name of moral and moralistic shootouts.
Still, this is where Blue Ruin takes a U-turn and goes to more original and more appealing places. It would take him almost twenty minutes of the movie to accomplish his task, although he does it practically in the stupidest manner possible. This is as far in time as he intends to plan ahead. Then he sees that this idiotic situation has not yet been taken to the authorities; that the remaining Cleland clan may want to take action. A great big man like Liam would say, they will come for him. They will hunt him down. Will want him dead. And, you know what happens next.
When looking at a film, it is better not to dwell on the politics or the funding, what difference does it make if the film has a budget of 200 or 200 million dollars, the film is about what is there on the screen. However, the making of Blue Ruin, and it is about wounded hearts – childhood chums Jeremy Saulnier and Macon Blair invest their earnings into their last chance feature film, find and audience partial money help and become winners in the Cannes – except it is essential for the storyline.
The couple may contend that their tale would still remain the same even without the studio and A-list support. However, it is still difficult not to think how such obstacles contributed to develop a slow-paced story centered on problems, both ethical and practical, which many more chic movies tend to overlook… How do you take the safety catch off a pistol? What physically do you do with an enemy trapped in the trunk of your car? How do you extract a crossbow tip from your thigh if you are not Rambo?
The director of photography, writer and director Saulnier also attempts managing an offer in his favorite Blair in chief roles. When Dwight shaves and smartens up (which, in most movies, is the cue that a character is ready to go back on track), he is made to be looking more retarded than before – a big-sagged clueless weakling with a chin somewhere between Paul Giamatti in Sideways and Bud Cort in Harold and Maude, with all the wide eyed helplessness as if she had seen a horror movie without being thick. He is no idiot, but quite frankly, he is not cut out for it. Sometimes unthinking, sometimes rather practical, Dwight is always quintessentially human and Blair’s strength and fragility is compelling and complex for an unusual female protagonist.
The rest of the more obscure cast performs brilliantly too (Devon Ratray – one of the dimwitted cousins from Nebraska has a nice supporting character as Dwight’s gun lover pal), but if there was any chance for them, the MVP must be one-man film unit Saulnier. There is a distinction in this moving skill level. Allowing us to see through Dwight Greatcher as if he’s watching the drifting sights, slow focus shots and drift tracking shots exist with limited views through intermedial cu symbols. The disquiet and despairing music as well as the sounds are equally wonderful.
However, the most part, namely the first half of the movie tends to provide a definition for what accelerated tension must look like. The depiction of violence is direct, yet not without a reason. For instance, when one character looks away immediately upon witnessing another character’s face blown off, she is told in a matter-of-fact fashion – “That’s what bullets do.”
If these reschedule some of its disadvantages, is due to the fact that they are a general misconception about the stories of an eye begotten an eye oh! Even so the execution of these eye for an eye stories is done rather flawlessly providing some scope to the thin and performending story. While these keep to the view points of Dwight, the extinct backwoods bullying Georgie’s thick necks are fading more and more. These however are rather minor in nature. This is cutting edge art-hybrid of young, talented filmmakers and rather notch & some calling card for which sauloner & Blair is responsible.
Verdict
Blue Ruin astonishingly betrays all the principles of its budget predator by presenting knockout tension and an unusual character study. Throughout for the ‘revenge is sweet’ of all: even those whose vocation is film making- or acting, if not their main protagonist.
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