The Devil All the Time (2020)
Directed by Antonio Campos
In Knockemstiff, Ohio and its neighboring backwoods, sinister characters converge around young Arvin Russell as he fights the evil forces that threaten him and his family.
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To be fair, Campos, who co-wrote the screenplay with his brother Paulo, seem to be trying for the same combination of bleak fatalism and jet-black humor that the Coen Brothers deployed in such films as “No Country for Old Men” and “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.”
“The Devil All the Time” echoes some of the despair and viscera of Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country For Old Men."
Upon its release, Pollock’s novel was compared to Cormac McCarthy’s work so it’s perhaps natural to remark on surface similarities in the movie to the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men.
There have been plenty of other examples of this being done successfully, just see No Country for Old Men (2008) or the countless noir films of the ‘40s and ‘50s.
It often recalls the resolution of Berlotucci’s The Sheltering Sky , perhaps not in specific practice (Pollack doesn’t cameo in the same way as Paul Bowles did in that film, and his narration is more specific to the tale rather than providing it a gorgeous coda), but it’s astonishing in own right, capturing the language and tone of the book while using its detail to enhance our perception of the characters’ deepest thoughts.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Devil All the Time consists of some backwoods Deliverance scenery, the airlessness of The Place Beyond the Pines , some shots swiped from Miller’s Crossing , and a general sense of wanting to be a tangled, Paul Thomas Anderson-esque rumination on brutality.
Campos steers away from arriving at 2005's Crash and instead heads toward something constructed with a poet’s eye, like The Place Beyond the Pines.
In a similar fashion to Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond the Pines, the movie examines the inescapable recycling of brutality across family trees, and does so with more coherence than was achieved by Cianfrance’s clear triptych narrative structure.
It isn’t so much hard to follow as all over the place, in need of a through line that’s more substantial than its ‘sins of the fathers’ theme (which makes it feel reminiscent, in some ways, of Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond The Pines ).
The narration – often condescending, going so far as to call one character a “sick fuck” after one heinous act – recalls the darkly funny narration of Barry Lyndon , used to both entertain us and also help us keep track of the ever-changing, ever-growing story.
Campos is probably aiming for a poignant alienation effect, giving voice to characters who barely know their own feelings, a la Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon and Todd Field’s Little Children .
The difference is that in those films, the Coens at least seemed interested in their characters as they moved them towards their inevitable fate while the Campos’s see theirs as nothing more than stick figures that they take perverse glee in mercilessly destroying without giving us any reason to care about either their lives or deaths or offering up any sort of notion other than to observe the corrupting force of religion, a notion that it makes over and over without any accompanying insight By the end of the film, it becomes abundantly clear that there is no real point to any of this, although the film does impart an endless omniscient narration (supplied by Pollock himself) in the manner of Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon” in an increasingly desperate attempt to suggest otherwise.
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One wishes for a bit of some good ole’ Tennessee Williams hysteria in the dialogue, as only Robert Pattinson’s diabolical Rev. Teagardin broaches such energies (his sputtering of “Delusions!” from his pulpit is a definite highlight), an odd-casting choice not unlike Marlon Brando in the lead of 1960’s The Fugitive Kind .
One exception to the film’s status quo would be Robert Pattinson’s Preston Teagardin, a replacement reverend for the Russells’ church who comes up from the South but maybe actually from another planet or Alan Parker’s Angel Heart.
He plays the town’s new pastor like he’s Nicolas Cage in “Peggy Sue Got Married,” with an accent from outer space and a preening self-regard that works like a defibrillator on the morose movie surrounding him.
In the tradition of films like “A River Runs Through It” or more melodramatic works like “Legends of the Fall,” Campos manages to evoke how in small communities family histories cast very long shadows.
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Watching The Devil All the Time , I couldn’t help but be reminded of Ridley Scott’s The Counselor .
On the soundtrack, Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans’s low-key, organic score dances around the popular tunes and close harmony spirituals that burble from car radios, creating an ironic American Graffiti -style counterpoint to the on-screen damnation.