Causeway is a drama about wounded veteran Lynsey(Jennifer Lawrence) returning to her home town of New Orleans to recuperate. She meets mechanic James(Brian Tyree Henry) and the two develop a cautious friendship.
After a little over a decade Lawrence returns to the type of indie material that launched her career and she seems to have lost the assurance she displayed in her break out Winter's Bone. It's not that the performance doesn't work but there seems to be an undeniable vein of artifice running through it. Perhaps given her high profile career and media scrutiny there is an extra barrier that she has to contend with that she didn't as an unknown. Even so, whether it's partly the performance or partly the script there is something that feels calculated and that's distracting. Henry is wonderfully at ease, charming, emotional, and real. The two have decent chemistry but his naturalism, by contrast, makes her struggles more apparent.
Shot on location in New Orleans, the locale has a richness and character that's refreshing(its not Atlanta standing in for literally any/all US cities). The score is subtle and effective, the production design restrained and real. The script itself though is a bit generic, seems almost fearful of delving too deeply into the emotion of either of it's co-leads. The two each have, very well put together, monologue moments which simply feel too clean to be honest. In tone it is too deliberate to achieve it's intent. Dog tackles the wounded-veteran-wanting-to-reenlist with much more electricity and truth.
Passable but immature.
Currently streaming on Apple+.
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