Galveston movie review & film summary (2018)
The novel was told in first-person from Roy's perspective, in a flowery style that (in this reader's mind, anyway) didn't quite suit its violent and emotionally brutalized hero. The script, which is credited to James Hammett (reportedly a pseudonym for the novelist, who wasn’t happy with the director’s changes) reconfigures the source material as a more distanced and observant piece, with no voice-over but lots of scenes where we get to hang back and watch people talk and behave.
Cinematographer Arnaud Poiter's wide compositions are elegantly lit and framed but rarely feel fussy or slick. They go a long way towards bringing a sense of physical realism to a story whose basics would have fit right into an R-rated comic book film like "Sucker Punch" or "Sin City." With its dialogue-free lyrical interludes and frequent lens flares and nature panoramas, the film is a chaste, bummed-out cousin of "Badlands" or "True Romance."
Director Melanie Laurent, a gifted French actress and filmmaker making her English-language directorial debut, treats the story mainly as an excuse to let the actors build out detailed performances, within carefully framed shots that give them room to move and breathe and make viewers decide where to look. One sign of confident direction is when a film doesn't feel obligated to cut to a closeup of an actor every time they say a line, and instead allows the camera to stay on them as they're listening or thinking. "Galveston" does that a lot.
It also puts you in Roy's shoes during violent moments, letting brutality occur off-camera or out-of-focus, or in shots that deliver information but don't linger. Paradoxically, this approach to violence is more disturbing than a wild and expressionistic or coldly clinical approach, perhaps because the film itself seems to be flinching. The aftermath of a climactic act of savagery is depicted with as much restraint as possible, short of not showing it at all, yet it's still one of the most sickening things I've seen in the decades I've been writing about movies. It casts a long shadow over the film's final sequence, which seems meant to be redemptive yet melancholy, but mostly comes across as very French.
"Galveston" is worth seeing if you're into nasty yet sorrowful crime films about small-time losers, if you want to see Elle Fanning in another breakout adult role, if you're a Ben Foster completist (as everyone should be by now), and if you want an especially vivid illustration of Roger Ebert's maxim that it's not what a film is about, but how it's about it.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46gmKWulajBsLqMa2dqcA%3D%3D