Why Them People in The Devil All The Time Gotta Be So Mean?
The Devil All The Time. Image courtesy of Netflix.
Netflix recently dropped its new prestige film, The Devil All The Time, a bleak Southern Gothic with an absolutely stellar cast. And the reaction from many critics has been some version of “Why are all these people so mean?” The film is indeed a brutal story about people doing unspeakably evil things to one another for about two hours, and if you are the type of person who cannot accept that senseless evil exists in this world then this is not going to be the film for you.
The Devil All The Time is clearly meant to echo other famous films about inexplicable evil that prowls the American heartland like No Country for Old Men or Terrence Malick’s Badlands. And the cast is phenomenal - Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Jason Clarke, Sebastian Stan, Haley Bennett, Mia Wasikowska, Bill Skarsgard. Adapted from a critically lauded novel of the same name, The Devil All The Time is intended to be a critical darling and a Big Important Film. But it does struggle I think in adapting its source material, to which it is remarkably faithful.
Narrated by the author Donald Ray Pollock, in a rare case of voice over in film being done well, we are introduced to the town and people of Knockemstiff, Pollock’s version of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County - except it is a real place, apparently. I think that’s why the setting feels real and textured. The way these people with no hope and no light pray and fight and drown and sin in the dirt of their thin existence feels like something resembling the heart of the matter.
But the film never quite elevates this setting to something bigger. I think that’s because it stayed quite faithfully tethered to the novel, and in a novel with the right prose and structure the elements being described and played with here probably land a bit more cleanly, like in the work of Cormac McCarthy. Had the film deviated a bit, it could have taken this well-crafted setting - bleached of morality and goodness - and done something more profound with it. But director Antonio Campos (The Sinner) is not quite at the same level as the Coen brothers. As it is, the intricate plotting from the novel plays out in much the same way, drawing all the narrative threads together in a vaguely satisfying ending which doesn’t have anything particularly interesting to say once it’s all over.
I have no problem with a film where the thesis is “People are bad, this is what bad people do to one another.” People are bad, sometimes for no reason at all, and that is a fine thing to build your film or novel around. This film goes a step further, reserving some of its worst characters for men of God, then suggesting very faintly at the end that maybe God, if he exists, actually does have a plan we simply can’t see it in all of its fullness. And in the end, bad men get what’s coming. But it just felt like given the cast, the source material, the setting and what they were trying to do, the film just doesn’t quite achieve the scope it was going for.
