Intro

I am a busy man. Between watching YouTube videos of people eating large sandwiches and wondering if horses ever just completely eat shit while galloping at full speed (it has to happen sometimes, right?) I have almost no time left to steal my neighbor’s mail, let alone watch movies. And when I do somehow find the time to set myself down and watch a new film one pre-emptive glance at said film’s runtime usually turns me off from the whole production, because within that glance I am exposed to a number so large it would make more sense on an advent calendar counting down to the heat death of the universe than as a representation of the number of minutes it will take the Barden Bellas to win another a cappella championship (the odds are always stacked against them, but music and sisterhood aren’t!).

Most movies are too long, is what I’m getting at.

But not all of them!

Some films actually scoot the fuck along in a way that vaguely respects the audience’s time, an awareness of both self and others that I deeply appreciate. I’m also smitten with the methodology by which this feat of narrative sprightliness is accomplished, because while the implementation may vary, the mindset remains the same, and observing structural ubiquities across otherwise disparate films fondles my brain-balls in that weirdly specific way we all like to be touched.

Here’s how it works, basically:

Instead of bogging viewers down with mountains of narrative baggage, those interminable details and qualifications that betray an insecure writer, you instead find the backbone of your film, whatever that backbone may be – tone, theme, character, commentary, plot, whatever – and you establish the fuck out of that thing as quickly as possible.

And then the most important part has to happen.

Once you’ve accomplished the above, you need to relax.

Seriously!

Let the driving force of your movie, whatever that driving force may be, just, you know, drive the movie. Let it dictate where the story goes, how the characters interact, the fucking visual palette; it’s amazing how fluidly and organically and efficiently a narrative proceeds when it’s moving under the auspices of a clearly felt feeling instead of the dictates of whatever we’ve arbitrarily decided constitutes proper form. Stop trying to micromanage every moment of the story, or consulting one of their weird screenwriting guides for each new beat, because as soon as you lean on that miserable crutch the heavy hand of considered feeling is suddenly obvious across the frame, and it makes your movie feel like a movie. Over-thinking a narrative basically makes you a storytelling helicopter parent, and nobody wants to be a helicopter parent. Be a cool parent! Let your kids get fucked up, as long as they do it here, at home, where you know they’ll be safe.

So let’s pour one out (I think I’m allowed to say that. I own both the film and album version of Straight Outta Compton) for a movie that should teach a fucking class on this storytelling approach: Blue Ruin.

Blue Ruin

Blue Ruin is a low-budget revenge thriller from about ten years ago that is really more a deconstruction of the genre because the film brings revenge down to a human level while simultaneously elevating the typically undersold or even entirely-ignored elements of violence into features of grimly-overwhelming narrative preoccupation.

Let me try that again:

Revenge is pointless because it is endless, and the people who pursue vengeance are too dumb to realize this.

OK, moving on.

Before Blue Ruin, a movie that I love so much I want to adopt it and carry it around in a BabyBjörn, has even finished its opening credits the viewer is set adrift into a dream-like interregnum, this miserable feeling of emptiness obviously taking place between one awful thing that has happened and the next awful thing whose arrival is inevitable. The tone is so masterfully realized that by the time a character (in the first spoken lines of the film) tells us what, exactly, went down, the information almost feels redundant, and when our hero decides to respond to this information with violence that decision feels pre-ordained.

And this weird feeling that we’re from the future and we’ve seen the events of the movie happen before? That’s tone, baby.

Literally everything in this movie’s attempt at weaving a dumbly tragic tapestry of despair (which I say with love in my heart) can be traced back to the tone. Plot developments, character interactions, set pieces, the fucking lighting are all borne without artifice from the miasma of regret and pointlessness that the movie establishes from its opening frames.

Our hero is a bum who breaks into peoples’ homes to bathe? The violent life isn’t so glamourous.

He barely talks? It feels to him, as to us, that he’d always just be stating the obvious, so apparent the next act of violence is.

He always looks so fucking sad? He’s just smart enough to realize that this is all pointless, but not smart enough to know what else to do.

He fucks up constantly, even in basic tasks like remembering the keys to his getaway car? Violence isn’t cool; it’s pathetic and dumb and random.

Interactions, even violent ones, are always so fucking awkward? We’re not going to gloss over the inherent madness with superficial, slick production value!

It’s fucking great (well, no, it’s miserable, but you know what I mean)! We can’t escape this movie’s tone because the tone is the main character. The tone informs everything, and everything is a manifestation of it. Blue Ruin understands that no movie can be about everything, so it makes the noble fucking choice to be about a single thing, and make itself the fuck out of that thing.

This is the part where I’m supposed to iterate over to a new segment, but I’m having too much fun riffing on this one, so let’s keep going!

This is Not a New Segment

Hey, you know that great, effective feeling that characterizes the first act of a horror movie, even most of the bad ones? That dread, that feeling of inevitability, that frustration over never being able to see what is haunting our heroes, even as that thing comes to control more and more of their lives? You know, that feeling that almost always dissipates as soon as we see the creature?

This movie is entirely that feeling.

The entire film is fallout – the initial murder happened years before we’re even introduced to the protagonist, so we’re handed a narrative that has already been marinating in its own emotional impotence for decades. As a result the story isn’t characterized by the swelling of latent emotion inherent in tracking down a figure of revulsion to give them their just comeuppance, but rather the complete lack of catharsis that comes from violent action. Nobody feels better after having done anything! That’s why I don’t even consider Dwight (oh, yeah, our lead’s name is Dwight – sure, whatever) the protagonist ; it’s really the tone, the feeling of helplessness against this growing thing that you never meant to create, that takes center stage.

I want to get matching tattoos with this movie and never tell our friends; it will just be our secret.

Get Your Poetry Out of Here!

Thrillers that style themselves as a thinking person’s action movie are usually just straight-ahead murder-vehicles that try to have their cake and eat it too by giving us oceans of gore and stylized death but then try to Make The Audience Think by tacking a monologue onto the runtime, a turgid honker of a speech in which our hero does The Meaningful Stare while whispering something about the inanity of violence. This is dumb. Violence isn’t poetic, and the people who do violence aren’t smart, and no amount of self-serious monologues about the fault in our stars can change that.

And this movie gets that! You can’t argue how meaningless violence is while also imbuing that same violence with meaning, or even basic fucking purpose. Violence is a dumb animal propelled by its own incuriousness. Dwight calls the family he is blood-feuding with an asks them if stopping the whole murder-retaliation thing is an option. This is great! What a boob. He doesn’t know what else to do so he just asks politely if the murder can stop now. This is what an actual person, not a silly Hollywood simulacrum of one, would do – not fire off some speech about descending deeper together into the fires of misunderstanding, but just be like, “I super didn’t realize how awful the fallout from killing someone would be, and I don’t think you guys did, either, so, uh backsies?”

This movie is nothing but a series of tragic misunderstandings, endlessly punctuated by violence and endlessly perpetuated by the fact that everyone involved is incredibly stupid. Top marks to the filmmakers for acknowledging the complete lack of romance that should always accompany presentations of violence! This is like what Game of Thrones would be like if anyone involved in its production in any way knew what they were doing!

The End

I’m going to die one day. With the amount of caffeine I consume and the, uh, indifferent way in which I drive that day is probably going to be sooner than it otherwise should be. So stop wasting my fucking time! Got multiple things you want to say? That’s great! Say them! But not all at once! Give me your take on one thing. If that take is spicy enough I’ll want to see your views on other shit, and I will search out the rest of your oeuvre accordingly! The less of my time you require the more likely I am to give it to you!

Watch Blue Ruin, it is so good!