Joaquin Phoenix’s performance in this film is gritty gold and bold. You won’t recognize him as Joe, a damaged war veteran who uses brutality to save young runaway girls used in the sex trade.
Phoenix was already slated to play Jesus in the upcoming Mary Magdalene, beard and all. When Scottish Director Lynne Ramsay called to ask him to play Joe, the beard had to stay. And to accommodate Phoenix’s packed schedule, it had to be shot in 8 weeks. The film was edited quickly to be presented at Cannes where it won Best Screenplay and Best Actor at Cannes and then tightened up for the theatrical release. He is in almost every scene.
Phoenix breaks all the conventions of what an action hero looks like. Ramsay, directing her first action film and first shot digital, liked his scruffy, stocky look because it breaks the mold. And it served both of them well, because he was so unrecognizable, they could shoot scenes of his walking the streets in New York without drawing a crowd.
Ramsay wrote the script, adapting it from the 2013 novel by Jonathan Ames. She wrote it before she even had the rights. She and Phoenix both decided that they wanted this film to be different. If the scenes they mapped out seemed to easy or predictable, they would change them. And you don’t know what’s coming next.
The pace is deliberately uneven, just like the score from Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood (Phantom Thread, There Will Be Blood, and Ramsay’s We Need to Talk about Kevin). It really accompanies the turmoil inside Joe’s head and a window to his feelings.
Joe works for John McCleary (John Doman, TV’s The Wire). He runs the business and assigns Joe the jobs saving the girls. We follow Joe as he preps for his next hit at a hardware store buying duct tape and a ball peen hammer, his weapon of choice. What makes his hits more chilling is that most are executed either off camera or in a long shot, and even in different angles from surveillance cameras. You hear what’s happening before you see it or the camera is pointed away from the violence.
Interspersed are snippets of Joe’s backstory. Ramsay makes you piece together Joe’s horrors from his childhood and days in combat in the Middle East with gut wrenching visuals of torture and pain. Ramsay definitively shows why he’s not only disturbed, but suicidal. But he’s as tender as he is tough in scenes with his Mother (Judith Roberts, TV’s Orange is the New Black) , who appears to be his only friend, and with Nina, the Senator’s young daughter he tries to save (Ekaterina Samsonov).
Ramsay uses water with great dramatic effect, especially with rain dropping off Nina’s hair, and in a scene where Joe is submerged. The light around him looks translucent and even cast a somewhat religious aura.
And in the most touching scene in this film, Joe comforts an assassin he has shot as he bleeds out. It’s a scene of surprising tenderness. This gripping thriller combines grizzly death delivered by a hero you don’t want to like, but you just might.
Amazon Studios 89 Minutes R
