After a run of generally disliked films starting in 2018, which threatened to turn the volume knob way down and possibly permanently squelch her massive success, Lawrence decided to take a self-imposed career break. The big, flashy films like “The Hunger Games” series made it easy to forget how exceptionally skilled J-Law is at being rivetingly quiet.
In “Causeway,” a quiet, empathetic drama, theater director Lila Neugebauer makes her feature film debut, honing in on Lawrence’s tiny, minimally shifting microexpressions and her aching melancholy. Lawrence has come full circle back to “Winter’s Bone,” and while it feels like a homecoming, the difference is that you don’t have to wonder if you’ll see that talented new actress again, but feel the subliminal comfort of a seasoned artist rocking her wheelhouse.
J-Law’s Character
Lawrence delivers a stripped-down performance as Lynsey, a sapper (U.S. Army engineer), who is returned to her native New Orleans after sustaining a serious brain injury from an IED (improvised explosive device) explosion in Afghanistan. That, among other things, left a sizeable dose of PTSD in its wake.Not quite realizing how traumatized she’s been by her head injury (or is it denial?), she’s hell-bent on rehabbing as quickly as possible so she can to return to active duty—whether it kills her or not. She really doesn’t want to be back home living with her mother, Gloria (Linda Emond), with whom she has a strained relationship. However, her doctor (Stephen McKinley Henderson) is dubious about her intended expedited recovery.
So Lynsey finds work scrubbing and chlorinating swimming pools. She also makes an unexpected friend in the laid-back, amiable mechanic James (Brian Tyree Henry), the owner of an autobody shop in the hardscrabble New Orleans neighborhood they both live in. Turns out, Lynsey played against James’s sister in high school basketball.
It also turns out that James is equally haunted. The two hang out, share Slurpees in the Louisiana heat, and beers and cigarettes in the evening at swimming pools she’s got access to, when the owners are on vacation.
They slowly disclose their respective traumas: She’s got the head injury, and James is missing a leg from a car accident, the details of which slowly (and devastatingly) come into focus over the course of the movie.
That’s It?
That’s All Folks. “Causeway” does feature a mildly dramatic confrontation that triggers a last-minute threat to Lynsey and James’s blossoming friendship, but it’s otherwise no-frills, with more of a gentle, understated rhythm where long-held conflicts marinate ambiguously rather than boil over. It could have been considerably more showy (original Afghanistan scenes didn’t make it into the film), but it prefers to cut to the chase—and it works, because “Causeway” is anchored by two seriously gifted performers, and it’s enough just to take them in as one would, say, a melancholic Erik Satie “Gymnopédie.”
Refreshingly, nothing about this film plays out as expected. It rejects a simplistic romance. Director Neugebauer perhaps tiptoes a little too much around the stereotypical assumptions of a template for an interracial drama, thus risking a certain inertness, but this is a story of two honest and honorable people, and the two leads give us a treat in displaying human kindness in action.
Lawrence is understatedly brilliant—anxious, reluctantly Pharma-pill-popping, best-foot-forward-but-deeply-conflicted, and admirably unaffected. And ego-effacingly sans makeup throughout. Henry, meanwhile, lends his character’s deep sea’s worth of stoic sadness the unspoken heft of a sunken Titanic.
Lawrence’s performance hopefully marks a return to the kind of real-people-and-real-places naturalism that initially won her acclaim; let it please be a harbinger of works to come. As a movie, “Causeway” might be a tiny bit too understated to garner awards, but it’s definitely the second-most—if not the most—important movie she’s made to date.
