Film Review: "Ain't Them Bodies Saints" (2013).

"A film by David Lowery" comes Ain't Them Bodies Saints. This romantic crime drama film written and directed by Lowery. A man takes the fall for his lover's crime, then four years later breaks out of prison to find her and their young daughter, who was born during his incarceration.

In 2009, Lowery. began writing the film while on the festival circuit promoting his film St. Nick (2009). At the time he was only able to think of a concept of a man breaking out of prison. What attracted him to the story was the thought of writing an action movie after having done a very quiet movie like St. Nick. However, he could not think of a compelling way to tell the story based on the concept so he left it. In 2011, Lowery revisited the concept where he added more ideas to his original concept. His initial draft took six months to write, and he had planned to shoot the film immediately after writing. However, production was delayed since Lowery and his production partners submitted the script to the Sundance Institute Producing Lab, in early summer 2011. The institute encouraged Lowery to submit the script to their screenwriters lab. In December 2011, It was revealed that Sundance had selected a screenplay by Lowery as one of twelve projects for its annual January Screenwriters Lab. Lowery worked with the Sundance Lab Artistic Director Scott Frank and his associates to develop the script. Lowery wanted to capture the feeling of the actions and write a script based on that in the vein of 1960s and 1970s movies and folk songs. Working on this concept, he thought about American folk mythology dealing with outlaws, developing into an outlaw who broke out of prison, then set in place the reason for the breakout being his wife and living in Texas he decided the setting would be Texas. After the initial script had been written, Lowery and his producers had a start date for the production. But they were advised by producers such as Jay Van Hoy, Lars Knudsen and Amy Kaufman to aim for a bigger production. In April 2012, Lowery officially announced the film. By early July 2012, Rooney Mara, Casey Affleck, Ben Foster, Keith Carradine, Nate Parker and Charles Baker were cast. At the same time, principal photography commenced and wrapped in mid August. Filming took place Meridian and Austin, Texas, and was shot on 35mm film using the ARRICAM LT and Panavision XL cameras.

The film stars Mara, Affleck, Foster, Carradine, Parker and Baker. The superb performances from Affleck and Mara are as memorable as Lowery's vision of something akin to hell.

The film is admirable visually, verbally, psychologically. It took guts for a neophyte film maker still in his twenties to fire two cinematographers before a third gave him what he wanted; yet the result is seamlessly impeccable. The film is an arena for apathy, both in regard to the characters' depictions and their subjective emotions.

Simon says Ain't Them Bodies Saints receives: