Bones and All

There’s a whiff of Let The Right One In during the first half-hour of Bones and All when Maren (Taylor Russell) invited to a slumber party by school friends, causes an incident that when she tells her father they are out of their home that night.

He subsequently dumps her, leaving her to get around the country on Greyhounds. Staying in the foulest digs she’s befriended by Sully (Mark Rylance) who can smell her, as she him, to a lesser extent.

Seemingly Kindred spirits Sully takes Mareen to a grand old house that isn’t his where he then starts on the lore of their kind, his own story and they eat. Sated there’s more background, with Sully showing off a bizarre collection he’s accumulated over the ages.
Creeping Mareen out, she runs off, catching another bus. Stopping for a break she’s spotted shoplifting by Lee (Timothée Chalamet) who, creates a diversion later for Mareen to find out they are alike.

Hooking up Mareen decides that she wants to know her birth-mother, and Lee re-establish a relationship with his family. Setting off on a cross-country road trip, the duo stay in foul accommodation meet others, fall out and get back together. All the while the viewer is provided backstory by their endless stories, be they in diners or around campfires.

The film is in the American tradition of Badlands and the vagabond traveller. Director Luca Guadagino, working on a screenplay by David Kajganich based on the book by Camille DeAngelis, knows how to compose a shot and at times it is quite beautiful.

But that can’t save the film from boredom brought on by the tedious, unengaging leads. These are people whom I suppose the viewer is being asked to have some empathy with, regardless of their actions. Their accounts and lives suggest they have had it hard, very hard in Mareen’s case. But they are just so dull. Rylance is the old sage type though he comes over as weirder version of the child catcher in Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang at times as he pursues and stalks Mareen.

Set during the Reagan era of America the road movie aspect of the film may work better as an allegory of that period. The people we meet as they cross the country are almost to a person bordering on destitute, on their uppers, living in terrible housing and just about making ends meet. In its own way it’s a horrific as anything else in the film, and there are some genuinely gruesome scenes.