Causeway Review: Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry Anchor Familiar Coming Home Story

It’s to Lawrence and Henry’s credit that what lingers is their characters’ uncertainty.

Causeway
Photo: A24

Lynsey (Jennifer Lawrence), an engineer in the United States Army, has returned from Afghanistan with a brain injury. In the opening scenes of director Lila Neugebauer’s Causeway, we see her, while in the care of a kindly social worker (Jayne Houdyshell), trying to walk, to write her own name, and to hold a glass of water. Throughout, the details of the plot emerge slowly; for one, we learn that Lynsey’s vehicle was hit with an improvised explosive device, and that she was sent home, to New Orleans, to recover. Before long she’s back on her feet, and Causeway, which begins in a static gloom, gains mobility as she does.

Eager to redeploy, and thus to feel useful again, Lynsey prickles with restlessness. With the Louisiana summer in full swelter, she gets a job cleaning pools—a device, a little rigged perhaps, that proves ideal for framing Lynsey in boxes of lonely blue. Production designer Jack Fisk taps into the drugged mood that he evoked for the Los Angeles of Mulholland Drive. For that film, he conjured a tropic brightness outside and caked the interiors in an ugly murk. Here the early mood is one of numbness and isolation, hence the lingering close-ups of Lynsey’s shadow on the asphalt, and, later, the chlorinated purl of the water, before she gets to work.

With Causeway, Neugebauer grazes close to a tradition of movies that dwell on homecoming troops—those who are tuned and stropped by the military, and fazed by civilian life. Sam Mendes probed that zone in his adaptation of Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead, in which Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, back from the Gulf War, stared out from his living room window and dreamed of the desert. And Kathryn Bigelow was drawn to it in The Hurt Locker, marooning Jeremy Renner’s sergeant in the cereal aisle of a supermarket, after he returns from Iraq.

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But Lynsey’s tale isn’t quite the same. Causeway’s screenplay, written by Otessa Moshfegh, Luke Goebel, and Elizabeth Sanders, implies that her dislocation started long before her time in Afghanistan. Her mother, Gloria (Linda Emond), who fails to pick her up on the day she returns from Afghanistan, is a fitful presence in her life. She comes home late, blurry with booze, and plays loud music into the night. Lynsey’s brother, meanwhile, is in prison.

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Which isn’t to say that Causeway is a story of abuse. The film is more interested in connection—in the way that people’s lives are locked together by circumstance, and the hurt that can leak out when those connections are broken. When Lynsey’s truck gives out one morning, she takes it to a garage and meets James (Brian Tyree Henry), who has a fondness for weed, a prosthetic leg, and a past that rings with pain. With his sad eyes and soothing demeanor, he strikes you as exactly the sort of person to slow Lynsey down, and you wonder if romance is in the cards. But Lynsey informs him that, when she does date, she doesn’t date men, and something in James’s unbothered reaction tells you that he’s simply happy for the company. And so is she.

Lynsey and James form a bond, and New Orleans seems to lighten in the process. They stroll together in the sunshine, eat sno-balls, and drink in a bar at night. (Lynsey opts for a root beer, so as not to mingle alcohol with her medication.) The pitch of these scenes recalls Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, but Neugebauer is treading darker territory in Causeway. In Linklater’s film, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy seemed charged by Vienna, as the depth of its history furnished the blank possibility of their future. Lynsey and James, on the other hand, have to make peace with New Orleans, to cast off its baggage and begin to look ahead.

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The key scenes, as Causeway reaches its close, all occur in water. We get a fight between Lynsey and James, in one of her client’s luminous pools, with steam rising into the night and James revealing the cause of his missing limb. Henry gives an extraordinary performance, flooded with deep reserves of guilt, and you realize that James is, in his own way, just as displaced as Lynsey. Lawrence, meanwhile, reminds the viewer of what she can do with a pared-down screenplay and long patches of quiet, redolent of her breakthrough work in Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone. Notice, as Lynsey sits with her mother in a paddling pool, the absence of any grand reconciliation. Instead they laugh, and you feel a relieved entente between these distant souls.

In the end, Causeway shows Lynsey in a public pool thronged with parents and thrashing kids. Is she now ready to rejoin the human flock? It’s an easy metaphor in a film fixed on difficulty, and it’s to Lawrence and Henry’s credit that what lingers is their characters’ uncertainty. You long to know what’s next for Lynsey and James, and if they can ever come home.

Score: 
 Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Brian Tyree Henry, Linda Emond, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Jayne Houdyshell  Director: Lila Neugebauer  Screenwriter: Otessa Moshfegh, Luke Goebel, Elizabeth Sanders  Distributor: A24 and Apple TV+  Running Time: 92 min  Rating: R  Year: 2022

Josh Wise

Josh Wise is the features and reviews editor at VideoGamer. He mostly plays games from at least fifteen years ago, but strives to find time for new releases too.

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