Movie Review: Galveston

Galveston *** / *****

Directed by: Mélanie Laurent.

Written by: Jim Hammett based on the novel by Nic Pizzolatto.

Starring: Ben Foster (Roy Cady), Elle Fanning (Raquel Arceneaux), Lili Reinhart (Tiffany), María Valverde (Carmen), Beau Bridges (Stan), Robert Aramayo (Tray), Adepero Oduye (Loraine), Tinsley Price/Anniston Price (Young Tiffany), C.K. McFarland (Nancy Covington).

 

The story being told in Mélanie Laurent’s Galveston is pretty much predictable from beginning to end – it’s another crime drama about a low rent criminal, who appears to be brutal and violent, but has a sensitive soul underneath that exterior, and the much younger woman he falls in love with – even as we know this is all going to lead to tragedy. In its outline and outlook, it’s not surprising to learn it’s based on a novel by Nic Pizzolatto, the creator or True Detective, which had one great, if overwritten, season, and one that was wildly all over the map (I hold out hope for the upcoming Season 3). And yet, the film is worth seeing for a few reasons – two of them being Ben Foster and Elle Fanning, who individually make almost anything worth seeing, so having them together is great, but perhaps more importantly because director Mélanie Laurent seems to intuitively understand that the story in her movie is on rails, so she allows herself to take some chances in its telling.

 

The film stars Foster as Roy Cady, a low level enforcer in New Orleans, working for a bad man named Stan (Beau Bridges), who is given a job that is pretty much nothing except a setup to get him – and a few others killed – so Stan can cover his own tracks. It doesn’t work for Roy, who flees New Orleans, and heads back to his home town of Galveston, Texas – believing that he has terminal cancer anyway, he doesn’t much care if he dies, but he doesn’t really want to let Stan be the one who kills him. Along the way, he picks up Rocky (Fanning), a 19-year-old girl working as a prostitute, but too naïve to really understand that is what she is doing. He keeps thinking he’s going to throw her out of the car, but never does. She even convinces him to swing by her house in Orange, Texas – and as he waits in the car, he hears a gunshot, and Rocky emerges with her three-year old sister, Tiffany. They end up in a low rent motel in Galveston, run by Nancy (C.K. McFarland) – and become a de facto family of three – even if there is no sex between Roy and Rocky, mainly because he doesn’t see her that way. They even have separate rooms. But no sex doesn’t mean no love.

 

Perhaps the biggest surprise about Galveston – given its origins as a Pizzolatto novel – is how little dialogue there is (in True Detective, he LOVED his overwrought, explanatory dialogue). The movie seems to sense it’s not necessary to tell the story, and Laurent has faith in her actors to be able to express themselves without much in the way of constant chatter – and she even avoids the clichéd close-ups here as well. Roy, feeling he is at the end of his life, is trying to set some things right – he goes to see an ex-girlfriend for example, although the pain he feels when it becomes clear they view their past relationship in radically different ways, is palpable. The whole middle section of the film is given to their life at that motel – an interlude from the real forces outside that are going to descend on them – as their bond deepens. Foster is gifted at going over the top, but this year, he has no delivered two impressive, under stated performances (he is better in Leave No Trace, but he’s really good here). Fanning isn’t really playing a Manic Pixie Dream Girl – a bad habit these movies often fall into – but someone who has already experienced too much pain and suffering for someone so young.

 

The ending, when it comes, has a feeling of inevitability to it – you don’t get to walk away from people like Stan. The violence on display in that ending is sickening – but mainly because Laurent decides not to show it in graphic detail. She sticks with Roy during this time (perhaps a leftover from the novel – which was told from his point-of-view) but that doesn’t mean the ending doesn’t really pack a wallop. The films closing sequence – set 20 years in the future –perhaps tries too hard for emotional catharsis – something not needed because what happens before then works better (although, it does tie up loose ends audiences would ask about).

 

Ultimately, Galveston is not a great movie – the story remains too clichéd, and although Laurent’s telling of it is surprising, she doesn’t upend those clichés the way someone like Lynne Ramsay did in this year’s You Were Never Really Here. What she does do though is take a movie that could have been made on autopilot, and finds a different, more unique way of telling it. Give her a better script, and she’s ready to make a great movie – especially if she brings Foster and Fanning with her.