THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME Review
Punishment is its own character in Antonio Campos’ THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME, a backwoods descent into the worst of human behavior. No deed, good or bad, truly goes unpunished for any character unlucky enough to be dragged into Campos’ story (co-written by Paulo Campos and adapted from the novel of the same name by Donald Ray Pollock, who serves as the film’s grizzled narrator). While the atmosphere of a sick and sinful world is wholly realized, THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME struggles to maintain all its depraved threads and characters.
Set in those small, forgotten towns trapped between Ohio and West Virginia, the story sprawls from the end of World War 2 to the 1960’s and concerns a wide cast of damned characters ranging from creeping preachers (Robert Pattinson) to demented lovers (Riley Keough and Jason Clarke respectively). In between those lovable likes, the story of the tragic Russells emerges. Patriarch Willard (Bill Skarsgard) returns from a violent war a quiet and traumatized man who meets the soft and genial Charlotte (Haley Bennett) at a diner in a town a few hours away from his. They fall in love and build a family with son Arvin (Michael Banks Repeta in his childhood years, Tom Holland in his broody teenage years) emerging as a beacon of hope for Willard, a man who only sees the violence that his world is capable of. But as the film continuously demonstrates throughout its dour 2 hour runtime, hope is a fickle thing to hang onto as darkness and tragedy latch onto the Russells, a familial curse that soon sets its sights on the teenage Arvin who becomes resigned to a life of protecting his adopted sister Lenora (Eliza Scanlen) from the encroaching evils of their evil little world.
It goes without saying that THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME throws a lot of characters and threads on the table, and even with a 2 hour runtime the film struggles to find a consistent pace, especially in its first portion. In this portion, which primarily details the plight of Willard’s attempt to make a simple, happy life after committing atrocities in the Pacific, the film switches between characters and timeframes with little flow. As a result, some characters and side stories feel more sidelined than others, specifically regarding the brutal saga of Lenora’s real parents (Mia Wasikowska and Harry Melling) which while wrenching in idea, feels little more than misery porn-esque in execution. However, once the film gets past its table setting first act and into the meat of Arvin Russell’s story, the film finds more solid footing in pace as Campos shrinks his adaptation into more personal shoes. While these later portions benefit from a more cornered position, the film still has to bring all the threads and characters together and for the most part, it does a solid job at doing just that, even if these showdowns feel planned out moreso than natural.
But that seems to be the point of the film, that pain and punishment and consequence is just as prevalent as the air we breathe, especially for the Russell clan. So despite the feeling of seeing the writer’s strings in the way the story plays out, the emotional effect of seeing Arvin deal with a universe hell-bent on seeing him and his loved ones suffer shakes out some heart-wrenching moments. Indeed, Mr. Holland, known more for his web-slinging heroics nowadays, gets to get a little gritty here and show a lesser known aspect of his acting range. While the accent is a little too much (which is the case for most of the other performers as well, each putting some TWANG in their country characters) Holland nevertheless elevates a typical hard-assed character into an at times genuinely stirring portrayal of young man struggling to overcome his dark origins and the darker world at large. Like son, like father, Skarsgard also puts in a tragic performance as the elder Russell utilizing his big sad eyes in more forlorn ways that elevate the near campy actions that his character further devolves into. Outside of these two, every other performer performs their duties admirably enough, even if most just play one form of a crazy backwoods psycho or another.
Outside of that, disappointingly, THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME never feels much more than an exercise in distressing filmmaking as the film covers everything from suicide, cancer, animal murder, paedophilia, serial killers, and more. As the film goes on, these dark ideas slowly begin to lose their power as they begin to feel like cheap ploys to make the film darker than it should probably be, but I get it, the world is (and has been) a terrible place but that doesn’t make a never ending depiction of its evil any more interesting than just saying the world is screwed up. While the story maintains its darkness, Campos visually situates his film in a natural, almost down-to-earth depiction of its damned localities, giving the film an authentically gritty look.
Despite those sequences where the film gets ever so close to making its pervasive darkness mean something (shown in the film’s much more entertaining and enlightening third act), THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME is indeed a dark time all the time.
3/5
