Company Review – Casey Affleck Entertains Us With Creepy Campfire Stories

GThen you’ll walk around a glowing screen and hear Casey Affleck’s campfire tale. It contains superstitions, murders, and human oddities of all kinds. An old hermit in his hut. There’s something wrong in the woodshed. If you liked the first tale, fill your boots and get comfortable, because here comes another and another; each was lit by the embers of its neighbor and played out with the same deliberately theatrical scope. Affleck’s picture wanders and wanders like a creepy Jackanory from a cracker barrel.

There’s actually a lot to like about Company, Affleck’s third film as director, even if many of its elements seem off-kilter eccentric; a little too washed out and self-consciously weird. It all begins in a tried and true way with the arrival of a mysterious stranger on a dark winter night. The stranger sits down and tells the story, after which December 1975 melts into 1953, then 1903, before finally the film crosses the ocean to Europe at the end of the plague. Nick Nolte is a recluse pining for his lost daughter, and Ben Mendelsohn plays a mean, caustic farmer who reaches for his gun all too readily. Both men, one suspects, are destined for a bloody end.

Where does this story of a woman telling a story about a woman go? Into the woods and through the darkness, of course, although the film’s central story, set in the Rocky Mountains at the turn of the 20th century, provides a torch that dimly illuminates our path. Here, Adelaide Clemens and Scoot McNairy play Rebecca and Emmett, a rugged farming couple who discover teenage boy Caleb lying prone in the snow. Caleb is played by Atticus Affleck, the director’s youngest son, with a foxy faux pas that becomes more confident and convincing the longer he’s on screen. Caleb tells Rebecca that he is much older than he looks; that he had been “back and forth” and visited Argentina and London. When she begins to suspect that a boy may be behind a series of grisly local murders, Caleb’s dark statements are unlikely to dissuade her. “This whole world is tall grass,” he explains. “You have no idea of ​​the dangers that await you.”

Affleck wrote Company with Ron Hansen, author of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which was made into a stunning 2007 film by Andrew Dominik. Affleck played Ford, a whining beta male with dark dreams of fame, unsure whether he wants to befriend his idol or kill him. A similar frightening duality is present in the character of Caleb, who settles on the farm and seems in no hurry to leave. Caleb may be a visionary, slacking off from work in the mountains. He could be a demon brought from the wilderness or beyond.

As for Affleck, his career has seen peaks and valleys since the heady days of Jesse James. He won an Oscar for Best Actor for Manchester by the Sea and appeared as an army intelligence officer in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Behind the scenes, however, he’s been dogged by allegations of sexual misconduct (later settled out of court), and it’s perhaps no coincidence that his passion project occasionally suffers from bouts of self-pity and features men who have been wronged and disbelieved by their peers. The hermit’s wife was murdered by a lost and unrepentant doctor. Emmett witnessed his father being shot and killed by a well-connected landowner. The law is a joke; innocent people are kicked to the curb. But these harsh remarks are too close to special pleas. They add little to the narrative; he could have cut them out easily.

Company is better and more pleasant when it returns to the fire and picks up the main thread; when he adheres most closely to reliable American Gothic tropes. Affleck clearly loves this dark subgenre and chooses to play it straight, and his enthusiasm is infectious and immerses us in the story. His film is a distraction. Maybe it doesn’t quite add up. But it has the ripe flavor of game with the crunch of buckshot in every bite. Don’t go into the woods after dark, he advises. And if a mysterious stranger knocks on your door before dinner, think carefully before introducing him to your guests.