Jennifer Lawrence’s screaming silences in Causeway will haunt you

In Apple TV+’s Causeway, a grievously traumatized war veteran is hanging around with a new friend she has made to feel ‘normal.’ The friend James played with unostentatious empathy by Brian Tyree Henry casually asks the war veteran Lynsey if she has a boyfriend. “No. But it was girlfriend…whenever I had it was a girlfriend,” Linsey informs her friend over swigs of beer in a pub where the same songs play repeatedly. It is this kind of casually revealing moment the extraordinariness of ordinary moments, which add up to the sense of watching something truly precious unfold in front of our eyes. No doubt Causeway is special. How special, is up to you. If you can put aside your own worries and sit through Lynsey’s attempts to come to terms with the fact that she has come from a violent tryst in Afghanistan to a cold hometown and a mother who forgets to pick up her daughter from the bus stand, your heart will reach out to Lynsey. As played by Jennifer Lawrence this performance is so stripped of self-pity you will be embarrassed for having been told to not shed tears for Lynsey. Let her be, let her find her way, the film tells us. Ms Lawrence’s controlled gritty performance is the kind that will be shown in film schools sixty years from now. See, there lived, this actress of volcanic powers who never allowed herself to erupt. What will get your goat is the lack of compassion around her. I am sure Lynsey doesn’t want to be mollycoddled out of her hurt and trauma. But nobody seems to care where she has come from (except the ever-supportive James), or where she is heading for. The brain injury, she tells James, happened when her car in Afghanistan exploded, leaving her partner in the front seat dead. This flashback is only narrated by Lynsey. Whether this is a mere budgetry constraint or not, the mere act of Lynsey opening up. Talking about her past is so cathartic for her, we stop we listen. We never stop listening. Whether cleaning the pool of the rich and privileged (and sometimes swimming in them when they are out of town) or hanging out with her only friend James, Lynsey is figuring out what to do with her life. We let her. We want her to find a way. What I didn’t follow was her distance with her family. Her brother Justin (Russell Harvard) is in a jail, and the one time she visits him they talk in sign language for a good five minutes across the glass partition in the visitor’s corner. We get the significance of the privacy of the moment. But I wish I knew what they spoke about after so many years. Linsey’s relationship with her mother Gloria (Linda Emond) is even more problematic. She plays the kind of fey emotional drifter who doesn’t know the ‘r’ of her responsibilities. Linsey gets more TLC from the wonderful Jayne Houdyshell who mothers Linsey after she returns from Afghanistan. It must have made her wonder why her own mother is like a walking advertisement for cold cream. All this is not good for Linsey’s emotional health, considering where she is coming from. The ray of hope that she sees, and we see with her has to do with the character’s inner strength. And course the fact that Jennifer Lawrence plays her is a stroke of luck for Linsey. I know of no other actress who could heal Linsey better than Ms Lawrence. This is her best yet. She excels at playing victims preferably with a great deal of physical pain. But this time there is something more, something more vital, healing nurturing and life-defining. Causeway is streaming on Apple TV+

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.