The only way this movie works for me is if you accept that Mare and Lee (Taylor Russell & Timothy Chalamet) are deluded, egotistical, awful people and if, furthermore, that is somehow the whole point. That would be an accurate portrayal of many instances of teenage love, so that very well could be director Luca Guadagnino's point. The film is masterfully made--at least for the first 90 minutes or so--and I want desperately to justify that it is a brilliant masterpiece. However, I fear that this reading may not actually be the point and that the movie is actually a steaming hot mess. Let me explain.
The previous collaboration between Guadagnino and Chalamet was CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, a gay romance between two self-assured young bisexual men who ultimately weren't quite right for each other yet wanted the power of their physical intimacy to prevail nonetheless. (Let's set aside the real-life accusations of fetishistic cannibalism against romantic co-lead Armie Hammer as being, perhaps, irrelevant to the cast at hand.) Clearly, then, the director and the male star of this film have a history of making complex depictions of queer attraction, and I think it's no stretch to say that this film is also extremely gay by the standards of, say, 1982 rural Kentucky.
Right before our first graphic, startling glimpse of flesh-eating, young Mare, having slipped out of the sight of her overprotective father (Andre Holland), is nestled with her high school best girl friend, cocooned between carpet and coffee table, sharing intimate secrets of grief and childhood trauma. Mare smells her friend's neck, appears to detect something she likes, and then snuggles closer. It is, almost certainly, the prelude to a first regretful kiss, happening right within eyesight of two other girls who are most certainly not feeling the amorous vibe. Without thinking, Mare sucks on her friend's finger, gnaws it to the mangled bone, and initiates the film's horror: screaming, fleeing from the police, self-hatred, questing for signs and understanding and escape.
It's hard not to see her story as one of self-loathing homophobia, set against the backdrop of Reagan's Bible Belt to a soundtrack of conservative talk radio amidst the specter of an AIDS--err, Gay-Related Immune Deficiency--crisis of which we must never speak.
Scrawny, dyed-mullet Lee, simultaneously proud yet insecure about his 140-pound-soaking-wet body, represents the possibility of a normal--i.e., straight--life for these two, but then why does he insist on wearing that flashy shirt that his younger sister says makes him look like a "f**got"? His choice to prey on a blatantly homosexual young carnie seems exactly like something a gay-baiting homophobe would do, but then, who actually jerks off to climax the gay victim that they're about to bash? And, more importantly, how does Mare manage to witness this and then say absolutely nothing about it afterward? Is it so meaningful that merely invoking its truth would destroy them both?
I'm getting ahead of myself. BONES AND ALL is a story about a young cannibal trying to figure out an ethical practice of cannibalism in a world that is built for non-cannibals and that would rather pretend that cannibals do not exist or can somehow be sectored off from the rest of society. Her first lessons in this, after being abandoned by a father who's come to accept that this isn't just an awful phase that his daughter is going to grow out of, comes from Sully, a Leatherstocking cosplayer embodied by Mark Rylance with mesmerizing, lived-in idiosyncrasy. Sully is weird in the way that all old strangers are weird to teenagers. He's additionally weird because he, well, eats human beings, which is something Mare has never encountered in real life before aside from her own indiscretions. Using his heightened sense of smell, like some gnarly turkey vulture, he tracks down elderly folk who are already on the verge of death and passively waits for them to cross the threshold so that he can feast on meat that is as fresh and ethically sourced as possible. (At least, he says, that's how he tries to do it most of the time.) This, it seems, is about as moral as cannibalism can be within this world, assuming that cannibalism is, like vampirism or lycanthropy, something that born-eaters cannot fully control or expunge.
But wait, is that true? Is it something they have to do, or is it more like a heroin addiction that they don't have the self-control (or what have you) to resist succumbing to? At one point, an eerie Michael Sthulbarg (more on him in a moment) calls Lee a "junky." But then, don't many proponents of ex-gay conversion liken homosexuality to a sinful addiction? A gay person can of course live a celibate life devoid of all romance, but should they have to? Is that a fulfilling life? Is a gay life necessarily harmful and self-harmful, as mid-twentieth-century psychologists were arguing, or is it only harmful if society makes it so?
This movie makes it so easy to get off track! I'm about to start arguing that Christ would not have condemned my marriage to my husband, yet I'm doing that within the context of people who literally murder and consume the bodies of actual gay people. Why is it that Mare has no problem with Lee killing and robbing the gay carnie until the moment she realizes that he has a wife and baby at home? Does his life have no value until he shows glimmers of being heteronormative? And why is it that young, brooding, looks-just-like-sex-icon-Timothee-Chalamet Lee is someone who's okay in her book, despite literally travelling the country murdering and robbing people, whereas old, smelly Sully is immediately dismissed as "creepy" despite trying to live an ethical yet fulfilled life? Why is it that Mare is so horrified by hillbilly Michael Stuhlbarg and his traveling companion (David Gordon Green), who live a life of "bones and all" shamelessness that gives off every impression of being a star-crossed romantic entanglement? The former cop played by David Gordon Green "doesn't have to be doing this," Mare discovers with horror; he's not a born eater--he was converted into it by contagious proximity, and now he CHOOSES to eat people, which, apparently, Mare would never do if she didn't have the choice!
Again: is it a choice? Mare and Lee eat hot dogs and milkshakes throughout the movie. They're not vampires or zombies who will decay and die if they don't get the sustenance of human flesh. Mare's mother (Chloe Sevigny of BOYS DON'T CRY fame), also a born eater and the genetic reason for Mare's awful inheritance, has apparently been able to live a life (such that it is) just fine without eating people under the confines of a mental institution--although her missing hands are evidence of "self-abuse." Perhaps Mare and her lover can resist their genetic fates by simply being stronger than their parents were? Perhaps they can move to Maryland, get jobs, go to college, raise a family, eat scrambled Teflon eggs, and just "be normal"?
Everything I've explained thus far is why I believed this movie to be a masterpiece resonant with symbolism about the dangers of allegorizing sexual identity as a moral quandary reducible to choice or genetic fate. If it's a choice, then it can just as well be seen as an immoral choice. If it's genetic, then it can just as well be seen as a disability that science and medicine may one day be able to treat and/or eradicate. Perhaps it only becomes problematic because society forces it into a black-and-white fallacy. Maybe it's possible to dream and construct a different society where it isn't a problem that needs to be deciphered and solved at all. Film that with beautiful cinematography, bedeck it with gorgeously immersive 1980s production design, round it out with some brilliant performances by Russell, Rylance, Stuhlbarg, and Holland, and you've got another 10-star masterpiece from Luca Guadagnino....
Except, wait, what's that in the third act? A flashback- and exposition-heavy twist about the oft alluded to circumstances of Lee's arrest record? A declaration of love between the two beautiful young stars despite them having no chemistry, openness, or significant shared depth whatsoever? A weepy climactic monologue from a self-doubting Lee that had my husband and I later discussing all the evidence for why Chalamet might not actually be a good actor after all? The realization that Mare and Lee's rejection of Sully as a "creep" isn't just blind ageism but is instead a prescient assessment of character since Sully is indeed a murderous, rapey stalker who fully becomes a villainous monster in the film's abrupt climax? A laughable finale of sex and violence that somehow manages to evoke the Kalima scene from INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM?
I can think of few movies that fall apart so radically and so thoroughly as this one does in its final half hour. The focus of the plot in the third act, the reveal of Sully's true character at the end, and the ludicrous decision of how to structure the final moments of this film all bely any of the evocative subtext that I've analyzed throughout this review. It's almost insultingly hostile how the film rejects all the substance it has so powerfully suggested in the first two acts of the film by loudly declaring, "No! It's not about any of that at all! This movie is about superficial, hollow, YA romance cliches! Haven't you been paying attention? Chalamet and Russell are sexy! They love each other! He CRIED, for crissake, and that made her love him for the MAN he really is!"
Either that's intentional, vitriolic, audience-loathing satire on the part of the filmmakers, and this movie is the masterpiece it resembles for so long, or I'm simply spending too much time trying to justify why I wasted over two hours on a pointless pile of crap.
The previous collaboration between Guadagnino and Chalamet was CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, a gay romance between two self-assured young bisexual men who ultimately weren't quite right for each other yet wanted the power of their physical intimacy to prevail nonetheless. (Let's set aside the real-life accusations of fetishistic cannibalism against romantic co-lead Armie Hammer as being, perhaps, irrelevant to the cast at hand.) Clearly, then, the director and the male star of this film have a history of making complex depictions of queer attraction, and I think it's no stretch to say that this film is also extremely gay by the standards of, say, 1982 rural Kentucky.
Right before our first graphic, startling glimpse of flesh-eating, young Mare, having slipped out of the sight of her overprotective father (Andre Holland), is nestled with her high school best girl friend, cocooned between carpet and coffee table, sharing intimate secrets of grief and childhood trauma. Mare smells her friend's neck, appears to detect something she likes, and then snuggles closer. It is, almost certainly, the prelude to a first regretful kiss, happening right within eyesight of two other girls who are most certainly not feeling the amorous vibe. Without thinking, Mare sucks on her friend's finger, gnaws it to the mangled bone, and initiates the film's horror: screaming, fleeing from the police, self-hatred, questing for signs and understanding and escape.
It's hard not to see her story as one of self-loathing homophobia, set against the backdrop of Reagan's Bible Belt to a soundtrack of conservative talk radio amidst the specter of an AIDS--err, Gay-Related Immune Deficiency--crisis of which we must never speak.
Scrawny, dyed-mullet Lee, simultaneously proud yet insecure about his 140-pound-soaking-wet body, represents the possibility of a normal--i.e., straight--life for these two, but then why does he insist on wearing that flashy shirt that his younger sister says makes him look like a "f**got"? His choice to prey on a blatantly homosexual young carnie seems exactly like something a gay-baiting homophobe would do, but then, who actually jerks off to climax the gay victim that they're about to bash? And, more importantly, how does Mare manage to witness this and then say absolutely nothing about it afterward? Is it so meaningful that merely invoking its truth would destroy them both?
I'm getting ahead of myself. BONES AND ALL is a story about a young cannibal trying to figure out an ethical practice of cannibalism in a world that is built for non-cannibals and that would rather pretend that cannibals do not exist or can somehow be sectored off from the rest of society. Her first lessons in this, after being abandoned by a father who's come to accept that this isn't just an awful phase that his daughter is going to grow out of, comes from Sully, a Leatherstocking cosplayer embodied by Mark Rylance with mesmerizing, lived-in idiosyncrasy. Sully is weird in the way that all old strangers are weird to teenagers. He's additionally weird because he, well, eats human beings, which is something Mare has never encountered in real life before aside from her own indiscretions. Using his heightened sense of smell, like some gnarly turkey vulture, he tracks down elderly folk who are already on the verge of death and passively waits for them to cross the threshold so that he can feast on meat that is as fresh and ethically sourced as possible. (At least, he says, that's how he tries to do it most of the time.) This, it seems, is about as moral as cannibalism can be within this world, assuming that cannibalism is, like vampirism or lycanthropy, something that born-eaters cannot fully control or expunge.
But wait, is that true? Is it something they have to do, or is it more like a heroin addiction that they don't have the self-control (or what have you) to resist succumbing to? At one point, an eerie Michael Sthulbarg (more on him in a moment) calls Lee a "junky." But then, don't many proponents of ex-gay conversion liken homosexuality to a sinful addiction? A gay person can of course live a celibate life devoid of all romance, but should they have to? Is that a fulfilling life? Is a gay life necessarily harmful and self-harmful, as mid-twentieth-century psychologists were arguing, or is it only harmful if society makes it so?
This movie makes it so easy to get off track! I'm about to start arguing that Christ would not have condemned my marriage to my husband, yet I'm doing that within the context of people who literally murder and consume the bodies of actual gay people. Why is it that Mare has no problem with Lee killing and robbing the gay carnie until the moment she realizes that he has a wife and baby at home? Does his life have no value until he shows glimmers of being heteronormative? And why is it that young, brooding, looks-just-like-sex-icon-Timothee-Chalamet Lee is someone who's okay in her book, despite literally travelling the country murdering and robbing people, whereas old, smelly Sully is immediately dismissed as "creepy" despite trying to live an ethical yet fulfilled life? Why is it that Mare is so horrified by hillbilly Michael Stuhlbarg and his traveling companion (David Gordon Green), who live a life of "bones and all" shamelessness that gives off every impression of being a star-crossed romantic entanglement? The former cop played by David Gordon Green "doesn't have to be doing this," Mare discovers with horror; he's not a born eater--he was converted into it by contagious proximity, and now he CHOOSES to eat people, which, apparently, Mare would never do if she didn't have the choice!
Again: is it a choice? Mare and Lee eat hot dogs and milkshakes throughout the movie. They're not vampires or zombies who will decay and die if they don't get the sustenance of human flesh. Mare's mother (Chloe Sevigny of BOYS DON'T CRY fame), also a born eater and the genetic reason for Mare's awful inheritance, has apparently been able to live a life (such that it is) just fine without eating people under the confines of a mental institution--although her missing hands are evidence of "self-abuse." Perhaps Mare and her lover can resist their genetic fates by simply being stronger than their parents were? Perhaps they can move to Maryland, get jobs, go to college, raise a family, eat scrambled Teflon eggs, and just "be normal"?
Everything I've explained thus far is why I believed this movie to be a masterpiece resonant with symbolism about the dangers of allegorizing sexual identity as a moral quandary reducible to choice or genetic fate. If it's a choice, then it can just as well be seen as an immoral choice. If it's genetic, then it can just as well be seen as a disability that science and medicine may one day be able to treat and/or eradicate. Perhaps it only becomes problematic because society forces it into a black-and-white fallacy. Maybe it's possible to dream and construct a different society where it isn't a problem that needs to be deciphered and solved at all. Film that with beautiful cinematography, bedeck it with gorgeously immersive 1980s production design, round it out with some brilliant performances by Russell, Rylance, Stuhlbarg, and Holland, and you've got another 10-star masterpiece from Luca Guadagnino....
Except, wait, what's that in the third act? A flashback- and exposition-heavy twist about the oft alluded to circumstances of Lee's arrest record? A declaration of love between the two beautiful young stars despite them having no chemistry, openness, or significant shared depth whatsoever? A weepy climactic monologue from a self-doubting Lee that had my husband and I later discussing all the evidence for why Chalamet might not actually be a good actor after all? The realization that Mare and Lee's rejection of Sully as a "creep" isn't just blind ageism but is instead a prescient assessment of character since Sully is indeed a murderous, rapey stalker who fully becomes a villainous monster in the film's abrupt climax? A laughable finale of sex and violence that somehow manages to evoke the Kalima scene from INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM?
I can think of few movies that fall apart so radically and so thoroughly as this one does in its final half hour. The focus of the plot in the third act, the reveal of Sully's true character at the end, and the ludicrous decision of how to structure the final moments of this film all bely any of the evocative subtext that I've analyzed throughout this review. It's almost insultingly hostile how the film rejects all the substance it has so powerfully suggested in the first two acts of the film by loudly declaring, "No! It's not about any of that at all! This movie is about superficial, hollow, YA romance cliches! Haven't you been paying attention? Chalamet and Russell are sexy! They love each other! He CRIED, for crissake, and that made her love him for the MAN he really is!"
Either that's intentional, vitriolic, audience-loathing satire on the part of the filmmakers, and this movie is the masterpiece it resembles for so long, or I'm simply spending too much time trying to justify why I wasted over two hours on a pointless pile of crap.