Director Luca Guadagnino reteams with Timothee Chalamet for Bones and All. A cannibal road trip movie with an appetite for romance. Co-starring Taylor Russell and Mark Rylance, Bones and All lives up to its pitch with the talents of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross scoring the film, and director of photography, Arseni Khachaturan, to make one of 2022’s most fulfilling films.
The trailer sells this film as something far more intense than it actually is. Like some sort of chase movie across state lines. Hunted by the ghoulish figure of Mark Rylance. It also seemed to reveal a bit too much, but neither of these things are true. One of the great surprises of Bones and All is how unrestrained it is by plot. It isn’t bound to the destinations that have been charted by plot, and it allows the movie to breathe within the spaces between Lee (Chalamet) and Maren (Russell). In those spaces, the film opens its heart to the troubled romance at the center of the relationship between the leads. Chalamet is a proven movie star with the capability of being one of this generation’s greatest actors. Russell, who has appeared in significantly less films, is relatively unproven until she gets her chance to shine here. The chemistry between the two hinges on the uncertainty of their situation, and their hunger stokes the journey with a fever that is unrelenting in its ferociousness when it is at its most intimate. When Guadagnino can dampen it with a cool rag, the film settles into an emotional groove that’ll calm the characters and audience at once. Guadagnino settles for transitional scenes that highlight the open plains and rolling hills of the midwest that breathe a remarkable sense of life into the story. Much like Call Me By Your Name, Guadagnino is able to use the setting to establish buildings and spaces of comfort to let the audience into the world to experience it as the characters do when they are the most open to sharing that vulnerability. Whether it be cereal for breakfast, a brief car ride, or a simple kiss at a carnival, giving the leads the opportunity to be who they are in familiar settings humanizes their cursed state.
It may come as a surprise, but the gore is adequate for the potential a story like this poses. It has moments of gnarly effects and pools of blood, but Luca frames these moments in favor of making it a terrifying consequence to their existence, instead of morphing it into cheap shock value. Too many filmmakers would displace the story’s emotion in favor of ours by making sure we have a physical reaction to the horror, instead of engaging with it as the characters do. By turning their feasts of flesh into a normal thing for them, it becomes normalized for us. Even if it is undeniably gross.
For how much of this movie is sold on the backs of Timothee Chalamet’s star power, the surge of Taylor Russell, and the premise, what brings the entire picture together is the behind-the-scenes talent. The aforementioned Reznor and Ross duo continue to solidify their status as creatively sharp composers who always understand what movie they’re a part of. The digital coding of The Social Network’s score blurs the lines between tech noir and biopic drama. HBO’s Watchmen revitalizes the torment of Alan Moore’s caped crusaders by giving their themes a contemporary spin. Their talent reaches a new dimension in Bones and All. The guitar is strung with unfinished chords, often noting an audible sound of hesitation before committing to the emotions that drive the characters. This takes the form of a continuous sound that could be mistaken by stringing together the tendons and ligaments that connect the tissues of Lee and Marin’s love. Their sound in this film isn’t using “the heartstrings” to illuminate a romantic picture of love, it’s tugging on the finer strands of their physical being that pushes them towards each other and their desires. When Reznor and Ross fill the space behind the guitar with a humming bass, their music becomes the audible form of life taking shape. It can be equated to the blood vessels within Lee and Marin that race with passion, desire, and fulfillment. When their hearts ache, the strings take over and punctuate the reality of their situations. It’s an overwhelming and complete score composition that should be amongst the best of the year, and arguably their best work yet. It’s a beautiful marriage of sound that accompanies the scope of the film by accenting the visual fidelity of the setting, and the personal attributes of the characters.
As romantic as I’ve been about this film, as great as Mark Rylance is, this film could have done without him. He represents this weathered state of Lee and Marin, perhaps as a ghostly figure of what they could become, but every scene after his first feels like it belongs in a different movie. There are some unconventional methods to convey the romance, the developments of story, exposition, and characters, but Mark Rylance gets his villain moment and it doesn’t sit right. The conclusion ends up feeling more rushed than it should, and it cheapens some of the resolve for Lee and Marin. Rylance is great in the role, no doubt, but it never feels fleshed out enough for what the story is really asking from the characters. The same can be said for a select thread or two sprinkled throughout the film that are great surprises at first, but end up feeling meaningless in the scope of the film.
Bones and All has a clever release date on the eve of Thanksgiving, and it’s an excellent film to boot. Set within the same decade as Call Me By Your Name (CMBYN), Luca Guadagnino’s reverence for the transitional period of the 1980s and growth itself is a fascinating basis for his storytelling. Aging through his teens in that decade, you can see how his youth inspired imagination and thought. Returning to that decade is no coincidence, and diagnosing this story with a dose of domestic turmoil for estranged youth in the middle-most part of the country as a juxtaposition to sexual and physical exploration in CMBYN is an interesting evolution for Guadagnino. The music harmonizes as an extension of characters’ thoughts, emotions, and conflict. Cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan visualizes this with distant horizons, swaying fields of grass, gusts of wind, fireworks, lights, and dark pools of blood. There is a wicked elegance to the images that Arseni creates, and when you pair it with the Reznor/Ross score under the guidance of Luca Guadagnino, you get a rich, flavorful motion picture. Guadagnino is becoming one of our sharpest contemporary filmmakers, and this spectation of the oft forgotten souls in search of the marrow of life should become a cornerstone of his filmography.