‘Causeway’ Review: Companions on a Hard Road to Recovery – The New York Times

The early scenes in Lila Neugebauer’s “Causeway” discover Lynsey (Jennifer Lawrence) within the first part of a protracted therapeutic course of. An Military engineer who suffered a traumatic mind harm in Afghanistan, Lynsey — with the assistance of a affected person well being aide (Jayne Houdyshell) — should relearn the fundamental features of day by day life, and train her physique to work once more.

Lawrence, somber and subdued, step by step coaxes her character into view. Lynsey emerges from a state of anxious blankness, recovering language, reminiscence, bodily coordination and the contours of her character. Returning house to New Orleans, she strikes in together with her mom (Linda Emond), who is just too preoccupied with different issues to pay a lot consideration to her daughter.

Not that Lynsey wants babysitting. She pressures her physician (Stephen McKinley Henderson) to clear her for redeployment. Lynsey is hard, solitary and self-sufficient, attributes Lawrence has proven earlier than — notably within the “Starvation Video games” motion pictures and in her breakthrough movie, “Winter’s Bone” — however hardly ever in such a low-key, non-heroic mode.

The satisfactions of “Causeway,” Neugebauer’s debut function (the script is by Elizabeth Sanders, Luke Goebel and Ottessa Moshfegh), come from watching Lawrence and her co-star, Brian Tyree Henry, buying and selling quiet, insightful bits of appearing. Henry performs James, who owns the restore store the place Lynsey brings her balky outdated pickup truck. Recognizing one another as fellow loners — and likewise, maybe unconsciously, as fellow victims — James and Lynsey begin hanging out collectively.

Lynsey takes a job cleansing swimming swimming pools, and he or she and James spend off-hours consuming beer, smoking weed and floating round on the houses of shoppers who’re conveniently out of city. Hanging out this manner is a pleasing respite from the stresses and struggles of existence — for James and Lynsey, and for the viewers too. However having introduced them collectively, the film isn’t fairly certain what to do with them.

James has misplaced a part of a leg in a automobile crash that killed somebody he cherished. Lynsey can be haunted by the lack of a member of the family. The symmetry of their bodily and psychological wounds is maybe too neatly organized. The bond that develops between them — and the ways in which it’s, inevitably, examined — is rooted in shared trauma, which is to say in a screenwriting conceit.

“Causeway” is each skinny and heavy-handed, its plot overly diagramed and its characters inadequately fleshed out. The burden of creating it credible falls disproportionately on Henry and Lawrence, very good actors who do what they will to convey the script’s static and fuzzy concepts about ache, alienation and the necessity for connection to one thing that just about resembles life.

Causeway
Rated R. Cursing and hashish. Working time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters and out there to look at on Apple TV+.