You Were Never Really Here: A Review
More like You Don’t Ever Really Care.
A review by Ian Thrasher.
There’s this feeling that I feel nags a lot of critics. The feeling of boredom. You’ve gone through countless movies and countless books and countless video games and countless tracks of music, and it has all started to blur together. You endure everything that the capitalist entertainment industry throws at you, everything that focus groups said that the consumer wants. What people say they want is a dime a dozen, and you’ve had it all. Water has become boring to you, but everybody needs to drink it, even though you’d rather have wine coursing through your veins. And not just any wine. You need Cristal, and you need it now. Only the expensive, hard to obtain, and most artfully craft of goods pleases your pallet, and by God do the frames of a movie act like wine to you. Let the commoners have their water. You’ll always need and have your fava beans with a nice Chianti.
Now, if you weren’t enthralled by this preceding metaphor, raise your hand. Be honest. You’re not in trouble. In fact, you passed the test. All of those who didn’t raise your hand, see me after class. I need to have a word with you. It’s about You Were Never Really Here.
It is a movie about Joe, played by Joaquin Phoenix. Joe is a hitman. He loves his Mom, he bashes people’s brains in, and he’s ROCKING that Dad bod. He’s hired to find the daughter of a Senator. She’s being pimped out to a child prostitution ring. He bashes their heads in. He rescues her. They find out her father, the Senator, committed suicide, maybe. Then police barge in, shoot a poor hotel clerk, and take the daughter away from Joe. Something deeper is at foot, and we have to find out what.
Trying to wrestle anymore concrete details out of this movie, details that might make one care about these characters, is like trying to pry teeth from an alligator. The movie forces you to piece together information from obtuse visual symbolism and confusing edits, which turns this movie into a chore more than an experience. I don’t mind working to understand things, honestly, I don’t. But I don’t like trying to understand things that I don’t care about, and it is insufferably pretentious of this movie to expect me to care enough about characters that we know nothing about in order to want to figure out their backstories from the scraps that the movie tosses us.
This movie has been praised as the next Taxi Driver, but coming off of Joker, the other Taxi Driver wannabe, I’m starting to really appreciate Scorcese’s talent as a filmmaker far more now that I have two films that essentially serve as massive pretenders to the throne, and the second one featuring Joaquin Phoenix at that. Taxi Driver is brilliant because it is fully committed to the fact that it is a character study, and it knows to give enough concrete details to make the viewer interested in Travis Bickle, the subject of this character study, but also leave enough up in the air and enough contradicting pieces of evidence so that the viewer can draw their own conclusion. Joker fails because it imports the foundation of Taxi Driver but sloppily translates it to a different context while also botching the narrative elements that made Taxi Driver come together. Joker is a dumbly made movie. You Were Never Really Here is the opposite problem. It fails because it is too smart for its own good, and is so busy trying to dazzle you with how artsy it is that it fails to establish an emotional core, and thus the movie becomes an exercise in trying to find a reason to care about everything.
The moral of the story is that high barriers of entry when it comes to comprehending a movie does not equal brilliance. A movie, or really any piece of media, can be smart and still be accessible. But above all, a piece of media, no matter what audience it caters to, should always be compelling. I could rant for hours on the technical shortcomings of Joker, but I have to admit that there’s something compelling enough about Joker for me to be able to do so. You Were Never Really Here doesn’t even give me that pleasure. Even after I started to figure things out about what was going on, the answers ended up boring me. But I guess I could have predicted that outcome. After all, it’s hard to become emotionally invested in a movie if you’ve spent the entire runtime trying to piece it together.
On a positive note though, it is mercifully short. At least the movie didn’t waste too much of my time.
Ian Thrasher is a graduate of the University of Utah’s EAE Program and lifelong video game player and overthinker. Aside from writing about video games, he also likes worshiping Fallout New Vegas and setting Sims on fire after building them a fancy mansion. You can follow him on Twitter @ian_thrasher or look up his Medium profile.