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‘Causeway’ Review: Jennifer Lawrence, as a U.S. Army Soldier, Goes Back to Her Indie Roots in a Downbeat Tale of Trauma and Recovery
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Causeway,” starring Jennifer Lawrence as a U.S. Army soldier recovering from injuries that are physical, mental, and spiritual, is the furthest thing from a genre film. Yet it belongs to what I’ve come to think of as a genre: the slow-burn non-verbal indie gloomfest. In saying that, I don’t mean to make light of the subject. Lawrence plays Lynsey, a member of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who returns from Afghanistan after riding in a vehicle that was struck by a bomb, which caused her to have a cerebral hemorrhage. At the start, she’s seated in a wheelchair, waiting for the home health-care worker (Jayne Houdyshell) who’s going to look after her as she undergoes rehab. Tentatively, Lynsey starts to walk, but for a while she struggles to bathe, drive, remember things. The brain injury has smashed and weakened her; she’s a person in fragments.