The actor-writer reteams with his 'To the Night' director Peter Brunner for a moving if slightly schematic story of a Texas priest battling small-town prejudice to help the unhoused.
A harvester of disease in “Antiviral,” a white supremacist in “Get Out,” mass murderer Martin Bryant in “Nitram,” Vlad the Impaler himself in “Dracula”: Caleb Landry Jones has carved such a niche for himself playing men not to be touched with a ten-foot pole that “Down the Arm of God” immediately stands out for casting the actor as a man of regular, common decency. The takeaway, however, from this affectingly earnest social drama is that decency is neither common nor regular in an increasingly divided, individualist America — something that Jones’ character, small-town Texas priest Nick, learns to his growing anguish.
Reteaming the star with Austrian director Peter Brunner, “Down the Arm of God” presents an unsurprisingly skeptical outsider’s view of the land of the free in the MAGA era — its foundational democratic values compromised by desperate economic inequality and bitter ongoing conflicts of race and class. With a diverse ensemble mixing name actors and non-professionals, the film’s first half recalls documentary-infused observational drama in the mold of early Chloé Zhao, as it follows Nick’s efforts to engage with a homeless community on the edge of his parish.
The second, segueing into violently heated, politicized melodrama, is less convincing. But the whole thing is kept on track by the worn, steadfast integrity of Jones’ performance: It’s clear that the film, which he co-wrote with Brunner following their work together on 2018’s tense psychodrama “To the Night,” is a passion project for him, to the extent that his own father John has a fleeting but crucial cameo. Following its world premiere in Locarno’s audience-oriented Piazza Grande section, this French-American co-production (Jones’ “Dracula” director Luc Besson is among the producers) should secure arthouse distribution (or a streaming deal) on both sides of the Atlantic. Breakout potential may be curbed by its stolid, downbeat nature.
Shooting in a widescreen format that gives ironic grandeur to a squat, featureless town in the Texas Panhandle, DP Peter Flinckenberg is attentive to the piercing, sometimes radiant winter light of the region in the harshest months of the year. There’s a sparse, severe beauty to its unremarkably suburban vistas, with their freeze-dried lawns and stripped, skeletal trees, but mostly you feel the face-slapping cold through the screen. It’s certainly what Nick first notices as a newcomer to the area, having been rather thanklessly assigned there by the Church; his congregation, consisting mostly of superficially polite but insular white Christian conservatives, isn’t all that warm either.
But he’s young and keen and persistent, winning over at least some converts with his amiably straight-talking sermon style and his passionate, community-minded charity drives. On the latter front, he concentrates much effort on a settlement of homeless people barely surviving on the town fringes; they’re wary of his interest at first, but eventually accept his help, with idealistic young Black woman Raven (India Marie Cross, a superb discovery) emerging as their uncompromising leader.
But Nick learns the limits of his parishioners’ charity when, as the frostiest temperatures set in, he advocates temporarily sheltering them in the town gymnasium or, failing that, the church itself. Met with a wall of combined NIMBYism and racially coded prejudice from the townspeople — with ultra-Aryan couple Anna (Mena Suvari) and Chris (Nick Stahl) his most hostile opponents — Nick overrides their will and moves the homeless into the house of God anyway. Cue an increasingly fraught war of words — and, eventually and inevitably, other very American weapons — in the congregation, with even the good preacher tiring of turning the other cheek.
To begin with, Brunner and Jones’ script brims with patient, generous human interest, abetted by the director’s sure touch with actors of all abilities: Early scenes find hitherto separate demographics sizing each other up and marking out common ground. As it progresses, however, issues and characters alike grow more polarized, in ways that make the film persuasive as polemic — and as an eminently worthy PSA, concluding with a series of title cards about America’s wider homelessness crisis — but slightly less interesting as drama.
Beset with inner demons and scarring family tragedy, Nick is a consistently compelling protagonist, but wants for an antagonist of equivalent nuance and complexity: He’d already be on the side of the angels even if the likes of Anna and Chris weren’t such flatly hateful stereotypes. Still, this urgent, moving film is very much a work of its fractious era, when the time taken to see your opponent’s side might come at the expense of someone more worthy of grace.