Dir: Lila Neugebauer. Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Brian Tyree Henry, Linda Emond, Jayne Houdyshell, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Russell Harvard. 15, 94 minutes.
Causeway isn’t about the actor Jennifer Lawrence. But in its own strange way it serves as a metaphor for Lawrence herself. It’s about a young woman who blows up – albeit in a war rather than Hollywood – and then has to pick up the pieces. It’s Lawrence’s first proper starring role since 2018, when a run of largely disliked projects (the Chris Pratt space romance Passengers; the masterful-slash-loathed biblical allegory Mother!) collided with her enormous fame and sent her on a self-imposed career break. All that noise made it easy to forget how good she is at being quiet. In Causeway, director Lila Neugebauer lingers on her star’s tiny shifts in expression, her shrinking melancholy. We haven’t seen this side of Lawrence since her star-making role in the 2010 neo-western Winter’s Bone. It feels like a homecoming.
