Directed by: Jeremy Saulnier.
Written by: Jeremy Saulnier.
Starring: Macon Blair (Dwight), Devin Ratray (Ben Gaffney), Amy Hargreaves (Sam), Kevin Kolack (Teddy Cleland), Eve Plumb (Kris Cleland), David W. Thompson (William), Brent Werzner (Carl Cleland), Stacy Rock (Hope Cleland), Sidné Anderson (Officer Eddy), Bonnie Johnson (Margaret), Ydaiber Orozco (Amanda).
Stories
about revenge are amongst the oldest stories in history – and movies about
revenge have been around since the beginning. The reason is simple – revenge
stories are simple, visceral, violent and instantly relatable. Who doesn’t at
least sympathize with someone trying to get revenge on the people who wronged
them? Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin is in many ways a classic revenge story – the
story of a man who sets out to get vengeance on the man who killed his parents.
But Saulnier subtly twists the genre – not enough that he’s twisting the genre
just to be clever or for the sake of twisting it, but enough that the film
keeps you guessing as to what is going to happen – and the reasons behind it.
The
film starts Macon Blair, in a brilliant performance, as Dwight. When he first
meet him, he seems like a homeless man – long hair, scraggily beard, dirty
clothes, digging through dumpsters and sleeping in his old, beat up car. These
early scenes – that are largely wordless – are among the best in the movie, and
Blair’s performance is subtle, yet holds the screen. When he is told that the
man who killed his parents has been paroled, he packs up his car, and drives to
get his revenge. He’s there when the man is released from jail, and follows him
to a bar. After a confrontation is the bathroom – that ends with the result he
wanted, but still counts as a screw-up, Dwight is forced to get ready to kill
even more people. Cutting his hair and shaving his beard makes Dwight look like
a mild mannered accountant – and when he visits his sister, he is still barely
able to get himself to talk above whisper. He knows that the family of the dead
man – criminals in their own right – isn’t going to let him get away with what
he did, so he prepares for more.
But
Dwight does not all of a sudden become a Charles Bronson, Death Wish-type
killing machine. The confrontations are often end the way he wants to, but are
clumsy, bloody, messy, and end with him being hurt. And when he gets hurt, he
stays hurt. One of the best sequences in the movie involves an arrow wound he
gets to the leg. The movie sets it up like a typical scene – with Dwight going
to the store to get everything he needs to remove the arrow, and stitch himself
up himself – but ends in a much more realistic way.
That
type of scene – setting it up like a normal revenge movie would, but ending in
a different, more realistic way, pretty much describes the movie as a whole as
well. I won’t spoil the secrets of the movie, but needless to say, things are
not as simple as Dwight thought they were. In some ways, the movie is like
Chan-wook Park’s revenge trilogy – Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy and Lady
Vengeance – except instead of going over the top, and trying to screw with the
audiences head, Saulnier tries to bring things back down to earth. The end
result is the same though – the main character realizing that he, and everyone
else, would have been much better off had they not started down the path to
vengeance in the first place. This may not be an overly original message – but
it’s still effective in the hands of Saulnier, and Blair.
Blue
Ruin is micro budgeted filmmaking at its best. Saulnier, who has only directed
one other film – the horror comedy Murder Party (unseen by me), used
Kickstarter to fund the movie, and unlike some more recent projects that used
the website, didn’t have a name brand to fall back on. This is stripped to the
bone, raw, bloody filmmaking – expertly written and directed, and whose acting
is better than most films with bigger budgets, and names. It may not be the
most original film of the year – but it’s still great filmmaking.
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