The Razzies have their winner! The Devil All The Time is the worst film of the year and it isn’t even close.
Genre: Southern Gothic Period Drama
Premise: Um, a group of god-fearing individuals weave in and out of each other’s lives after returning from the war.
About: If you ever see a bad movie, especially one with a weak concept, and wonder, “How did they get such a great cast?” The answer is almost always they landed a big fish first and the rest of the cast signed on because of them. Everyone wants to be in a movie with a hot or great actor. From what I understand (though someone can correct me if I’m wrong), director Antonio Campos socializes in the same circle as the Safdie Brothers and became friendly with Robert Pattinson while the Safdies were shooting Good Time. He got Pattinson to commit to “Devil,” and all the rest of the young buzzy actors (Tom Holland, Bill Skarsgaard, Riley Keough, and Sebastian Stan) followed suit. “Devil” was originally a novel written by a man with an inspiring story. Donald Ray Pollock spent thirty-two years employed as a laborer at the Mead Paper Corporation in Ohio, before enrolling in the MFA program at Ohio State University. His first book, Knockemstiff, would go on to win the 2009 PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship. It’s never too late to become a successful writer!
Writer: Antonio and Paulo Campos (based on the 2012 novel by David Ray Pollock)
Details: Too long
We’re in a really strange place with movies right now. I don’t know if The Devil All The Time gets made in any other era but this one. It has an indie sensibility that implies it could’ve been made by 1990s Miramax. But the cast feels too young for this type of material, which may be why it’s not rating high on Netflix’s most-watched ladder (it’s currently at #5 on its first weekend). Audiences aren’t sure what to make of it.
To the streamers’ credit, this is what a streaming service is able to do that movies beholden to the traditional distribution system could not. They can make stuff that doesn’t need to be “marketable.” But it’s becoming clearer that the more you throw these unproven creatives into the deep end of the pool, the worse the content gets.
I mean I watched 30 minutes of that new Netflix show, “Away,” about going to Mars. They crammed more melodrama into those first 30 minutes than that Fox show, “Empire” did in five seasons. That’s one of the more obvious indicators that a creative is a beginner. They go all in on the melodrama.
But Netflix seems determined – outside of the 2-3 big artistic names it recruits each year to win an Oscar – to embrace the quantity over quality approach. And, in doing so, figures that some of that quantity will rise to the top just by sheer odds. Let’s see what’s going on with its latest big feature effort.
A fair warning. There’s no plot to this movie so attempting to summarize it is impossible. But here’s my best stab at it. First and foremost, there’s a narrator who begins speaking gibberish that has nothing to do with anything. He’s a big part of the movie so get used to him.
A young man named Willard returns home to his small town after the war. I think World War 2 but if you told me it was the Civil War I wouldn’t be able to confidently tell you you were wrong.
Willard falls in love with a waitress and has a son with her but, uh oh, his wife gets cancer. Willard and his son, who I think is named Arvin, go down to a special place in the forest every night to pray like crazy for God not to kill off his wife. But God does not grant their wish. Poor Little Arvin is really upset but he’s about to get even more upset. That’s because, right after the funeral, Willard kills himself!
Meanwhile, there’s this young woman named Helen who marries this batshit crazy weirdo named Roy who’s super-religious, so much so that he does this little parlor trick whenever he goes to church and pours a box of live spiders over his face. So is anybody surprised when, after Roy has a daughter with Helen, that he stabs his wife in the trachea? Not me. Is anybody surprised when, after he kills her, he tries to revive her with God’s help? Not me!
A dozen years later we’re hanging out with Arvin again, except he’s in high school now. Oh, and he’s half-brother or step-brother to Lenora, Crazy Roy’s daughter. Have you tuned out yet? I know I have. This is a real movie. Like, people gave other people money to make this.
Oh, then we have the local preacher who preys on underage girls cause this movie is going to hit all the tropes so get used to it. The preacher takes a special liking to Lenora, Arvin’s half-sister or step-sister or step-uncle or whatever, and has sex with her. She ends up pregnant! When the preacher says to get an abortion, she’s devastated so she hangs herself.
Okay, stop. Stop stop stop.
Do I even need to go on?
Where does one begin with a movie like this?
I guess I’ll start with the narrator.
There are two reasons to choose a narrator for your screenplay. Reason one is that it’s an artistic choice you believe will enhance the story. Reason two is that you have no fucking clue what your movie is about and therefore you need a narrator to desperately keep your random wackadoodle movie on course.
That’s exactly what this narrator is for. Nobody knew what this movie was about. None of the characters had any actual purpose or goal. So we needed someone to trick audiences into believing there was actually a point to everything.
While I don’t believe this movie is good enough to warrant actual analysis, I’ve seen the following screenwriting mistake a lot so I’ll share this one observation with you. THE FIRST ACT OF THIS MOVIE IS BACKSTORY. It’s backstory. It’s backstory. It’s backstory. We don’t need to see ma and pa’s life for 30 (THIRTY!) minutes before the main character’s story begins.
How do I know this is backstory? Because we don’t see Tony Stark’s mom and dad’s story for 30 minutes before we meet him in Iron Man. We don’t see Bradley Cooper’s parents’ story for 30 minutes before we meet him in American Sniper. We don’t meet Mad Max’s parents for THIRTY FREAKING MINUTES before the nuclear war that turns him into the Road Warrior.
We COULD’VE written the parents story for all three of those characters. Why didn’t we? BECAUSE IT’S FREAKING BACKSTORY THAT’S WHY!!!! BACKSTORY BACKSTORY BACKSTORY. Maybe if I yell it enough times, someone out there who’s currently using half their screenplay for backstory will have an epiphany.
But let’s give the writers the backstory conceit. This is an artsy movie. The rules are different for artsy movies. You’re allowed to bore audiences more so why not take advantage of it. Okay, even if I give you that, someone explain to me the odds that you could murder your wife in the woods, try to unsuccessfully have Jesus resurrect her, and then, just ten short hours later, meet a serial killer couple who forces you to have sex with the wife while the husband takes pictures, and, when you refuse to, he kills you.
Give me the basic odds on that happening to someone in 1960. Would you think… 1 in 10 billion? 1 in 100 billion? My guess would be somewhere around there.
And yet, the Devil All The Time writers would have you believe this was as common as getting a flat tire.
By the way, this happens AFTER a woman dies of cancer and the husband kills herself. These writers pulled a DOUBLE-DEATH on us then a murder, then a SECOND MURDER less than 10 hours later.
That’s where this movie really bothers me. You can tell by the cinematography and the introspective monologuing by the narrator that this movie wants to be taken seriously. And yet every choice is so over-the-top that there isn’t a serious bone in the film’s body. It’s all inelegant clumsiness, like a 6th grader trying to write Moonlight.
I don’t know why I’m getting so triggered by this flick. I think I have issues when the writing is so bad that I don’t even know how anyone involved got this far in their career. I mean this is such trash. These writers would be struggling to come up with good soap opera material. Honestly, they would be lucky if the producer even gave them a call. But, the director is also one-half of the writing team so they don’t need their script to win over anyone.
And guess what? When you don’t have to win anyone over with your script, this is what you get. An incoherent poorly written melodramatic hodge-podge of dumb ideas that can only be called a movie because the editor cut them together in Final Cut. This is so bad. Like train-wreck level awful. I don’t know how anything like this gets made. I mean, I do. I understand logistically how people make the mistake of greenlighting something like this. But I’m still baffled that something this bad could be released to the public.
Wow.
[x] gothic trash
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Double-deaths are the embodiment of desperate writing – you have so little faith in your product that your only tool is hail mary story beats like repeatedly killing characters off (usually through cancer or murder – the two most cliche ways to kill characters off).
