★★★★☆
Four Stars
Jeremy Saulnier, director of Blue Ruin, is primarily a cinematographer. He is credited with performing that role, the direction, and the writing of the film, and it is not difficult to see how the three intertwine as visual and spoken cues are often complemented by aesthetic choices and colour palette. The first feature film Saulnier has had such control over, Blue Ruin is accomplished and compact, and refuses to compromise on his array of skills.
Ostensibly, the film is a revenge thriller in which initially bearded Dwight (Macon Blair) parts the hair from his eyes and sets out to murder the man who has just finished serving a prison sentence for murdering his parents. His ritualistic shaving is the first moment of clarity in the film, occurring after about ten minutes of intoxicating blue washes, where the audience’s experience mirrors Dwight’s perspective. We watch him drift aimlessly through menial tasks, rummage through bins for food, and eventually settle down to sleep at night in his battered Pontiac, the “blue ruin” of the title. Once the news of the release of Wade Cleland, Jr. filters through, however, his existence is given purpose, and the film too gains direction.
And yet, despite the obvious generic reference point, it would not be a spoiler to note that Dwight gains at least a part of the revenge he sets out for. The purpose of Blue Ruin is to dissect the aftermath of his revenge; examining whether any action that he manages to undertake actually furthers his cause in any productive way. On the level of its plot, Blue Ruin tests the validity of the adage that ‘revenge is a dish best served cold’ by forcing the audience to chew over every mouthful.
Dwight might shave his mass of tangled facial hair in order to create a disguise — he is startlingly transformed — but the lesson of the film seems to be that nothing can alter his pathetic core. One poignant moment of many in this darkly comic film is a scene that begins with Dwight attempting to reason with his sister through the translucent back door, while she potters around her kitchen. Even after discovering that he is a killer, Dwight gains no status in her eyes, and indeed gradually wilts as the film wears on; Blair is impeccably convincing in the role of a man caught up in something he has long since lost any control over. The film strips back many of the masculine, dominant characteristics we might typically associate with a revenge thriller hero, and challenges the clean conclusions of many similar genre flicks.
Blue Ruin’s willingness to wallow in the failures of its protagonist simultaneously excites sympathy and pity, and Saulnier’s handling of Dwight’s narrative arc is sensitive. Ultimately, it is the distance he creates between himself as auteur artist and his project’s character that is most striking; his direction revels in the act of portrayal, rather than the subject it is portraying. Dwight’s flawed revenge is not smooth or clear-cut, and the humour Saulnier displays in enacting it — complete with a farcically messy headshot scene — is what steers Blue Ruin away from self-absorption. Like his symbolic, ruined Pontiac, Dwight’s failures are not romanticised, and neither are they indulged. They are spattered with the blood of revenge, and it gets everywhere.
