Blue Ruin
I loved Blue Ruin. As far as revenge movies go, it’s almost late Stuart Gordon meets early Coen Brothers, a brutal amalgam of King of the Ants and Blood Simple. I’m going to go out of my way not to spoil it, but bear in mind that it might be the kind of movie that you want to know as little as possible about when watching it.
Dwight is a drifter, living in his decaying car on the beach, feeding off the garbage, and breaking into people’s houses to take a shower.
Early on, after Dwight has just escaped discovery on one of these houses, a police car approaches his “residence”. The cop, a large, affable black woman, tells him that she wanted him to be in a safe place when he found out, and that someone’s going to be released.
Dwight shambles around for a bit, preparing for something. It doesn’t take too long for us to learn that his parents got killed some time back, and it’s the killer’s release the cop told him about. We only learn it as the plot’s pendulum swing past that particular point, unstoppable, slowing down on only to pick up speed to swing back, leading us on and pushing Dwight along the way, sometimes not letting us see a bit of information so that later it can confirm our guesses or wave them away.
It’s sensational at building suspense.
A violent act against his parents has left Dwight looking like a homeless Moses. In one of those oscillations that Saulnier built his plot around, another act of violence shakes him back to almost normalcy. He shaves his face, cuts his hair, and shocks us when we realize he was in his early twenties, not late forties. The movie had made no attempt to hide it, just had allowed our assumptions to mislead us. Moments ago, we thought of him as the Charles Manson of beach bums. Now he seems someone who’d be in the basement of a board game shop nervously attempting to argue Power Rangers chronology.
Violence begets violence, and once he pushes events in one direction, they will come back. And yet we don’t know in what way, or if Dwight will be successful on pushing back again, or if he even has an interest in trying to. And so the movie keeps us waiting for the next swing, which we sense but can’t predict, every pass near the centerline triggering repercussions faster and faster.
It’s not just the script that’s spot on. The photography is not only gorgeous but perfect at setting the mood to the right combination of pastoral, nostalgic, and lost. Family members look related. The pacing is relentless. Everything falls into place for the best effect.
That made it all the more surprising that not only it is Jeremy Saulnier ’s second movie, with his first being a horror comedy, but that it was funded with a $37,000 Kickstarter. Lack of funds has never been an excuse for shoddy craftsmanship, but I can respect when someone does an impeccable job with less budget than other films spend on catering.
I love that between digital filmmaking, free worldwide distribution via the net and crowdfunding, we live in an era where a talented enough team can will Blue Ruin into existence with almost no money. When someone complains that they can’t make art because nobody will recognize their talent and give them a few million, tell them to watch this.
(Originally published in Filmvore, my old blog)