ROONEY MARA AND CASEY AFFLECK IN AIN'T THEM BODIES SAINTS

Wispy homage to Malick

David Lowery's Ain't Them Bodies Saints is a moody, poetic little film about doomed criminal lovers. Set vaguely in rural Texas in the Seventies, it is drowned in sepia shadows and the dramatic light of dusk and serenaded by the music of banjos and cellos. Its mood and style, including heavy use of softly murmured voiceover, are so obviously indebted to Terrence Malick that every review remarks on it. It concerns a young outlaw who goes to jail for a crime his wife has committed -- the wounding of a cop. Some years later, on the sixth try, he escapes. He then tries to rejoin his wife and their little daughter. Lowery seeks to cast a magic spell and for some his effort succeeds, so there are many good reviews. But for others, the effort fails, and I must reluctantly count myself in their number. Saints certainly contains visuals and performances that would be memorable if the action were convincing or had emotional weight, but these conditions ultimately are, alas, not met.

One of the big problems with Ain't Them Bodies Saints is that it ignores a fundamental rule of storytelling, especially as pertainst to action tales: don't just tell, show -- and to a large extent it doesn't even tell. Most of the key events in this story aren't visualized, and only sketchily referred to. The scrawny young outlaw, Bob Muldoon (Casey Affleck), has a buried suitcase full of money he's stolen, but he's never seen committing a robbery. He serves four years or so in jail but he's never shown behind bars. His wife remains hung up on him, but refuses to visit him. We just hear excerpts from his romantic letters to his wife Ruth (Rooney Mara), sent from prison in voiceovers delivered in Affleck's usual reedy monotone. In them he pledges eternal loyalty and promises they will be reunited sooner than she may think. When his daughter, born after he was incarcerated, is about to have her fourth birthday, Bob escapes, but this is only reported indirectly. He later explains how he escaped to his friend Sweetie (Nate Parker), a young man who runs an odd racially mixed saloon. But the enigmatic tale he tells is humorous, poetic, not at all a real explanation.

In the opening scene staged out in a wide Texas plain, Bob and Ruth are arguing. She says she is leaving him, he pledges his undying love, she relents, admits she's pregnant, and they both press together and laugh. Whether the laughter seems to you cunningly natural or flippant and inexplicable may determine whether the movie casts its spell on you or doesn't. The two occupy one of those archetypal isolated clapboard Texas houses like the one in the classic "Travis, you're a year too late" Levis ad. While studiously pursuing the offbeat effect, this movie in fact narrowly avoids cliché at many points.

Of course truth is stranger than fiction and anything can happen, but events in Ain't Them Bodies Saints are implausible as well as vague, often both at the same time. We can't decide how likely Bob's prison break might be as an event, for instance, since it's neither shown nor described. But since the law is on the lookout for him after he's loose, it's surprising the way he can return to his little home town of Meridian and wander around. (One nice scene, for once vividly melding poetry and action, shows Wheeler just missing Bob, hiding in an upstairs room of Sweetie's saloon, and finding just an old photo of Ruth, which he keeps.) Perhaps since the film's images are always murky, the escaped Bob is just invisible to people. He not only hangs out with Sweetie but visits Keith Carradine (whose casting provides a self-conscious link with Altman's Seventies outlaw sagas), playing his benign former mentor, Skerritt, whose dimly lit general store appears to sell historical weaponry.

The policeman Ruth wounded, Patrick Wheeler, long recovered, has taken to coming around to check up on Ruth and the little girl, which turns into a wistful, polite courtship. As Wheeler, Ben Foster provides perhaps the most solid performance. Rooney Mara is arresting and still, straining less than in her busy and neurotic roles in the Dragon Tattoo remake and Soderbergh's contrived drug crime movie, Side Effects. But she has too little to do and just seems posing, a cross between a fashion model and a Dorothea Lange Dust Bowl wife. As for Affleck, he has made a speciality of arty period crime films, this being the third after Andrew Dominick's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me (2010), both of which, though flawed, have more substance than this effort. Less known of course than his brother Ben, Casey has a spooky, oddly confident presence that can make him interesting to watch, but it's uncertain whether has the authority to play leads. He has seemed better in supporting roles, in such wildly different movies as Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven and Twelve (2001) and Van Sant's Gerry (2002). It's debatable whether it's a good idea to use him for lengthy voiceovers: his distinctive and peculiar voice may wind up being all you remember.

Ain't Them Bodies Saints is a sort of ballad, as well as the chronicle of an out-of-sync correspondence, and therefore perhaps should not be taken literally. However despite the artistic cinematography (by Bradford Young), Lowery doesn't give us anything memorable to look at. There is one passage of violence, when Bob is pursued by mysterious outlaws, perhaps former confederates out to get his stash of money. This and the dire result are treated matter of factly to begin with, but anyway by this time one is likely to be too emotionally uninvolved to care. At best the action arouses only a vague sense of unease.

In fact this movie has a serious communication problem. Not only is it hard to see anything because of the romantic low light. The dialogue, spoken in an undertone, especially by Mara and Affleck, is largely drowned out by Daniel Hart's banjos and cellos, which rise to their highest peaks at the most inopportune and wrong moments.

Ain't Them Bodies Saints debuted at Sundance, which funded its development, and showed at various other festivals. It is distributed by the Weinstein brothers. Release date 16 August (UK, 6 September) 2013.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.