‘Down the Arm of God’ Locarno Review: Caleb Landry Jones Shines in Powerful Homelessness Drama

Known for playing intense, often borderline-unhinged characters, Caleb Landry Jones is hardly the first person one might imagine as a humanist pastor trying to help the neediest members of a small Texas town. But this project is more than just another acting job for him. He is also a producer—alongside, somewhat unexpectedly, Luc Besson—and has been an enthusiastic member of the creative team for several years. The film tackles homelessness and was shot in the middle of a Texas winter with men and women who are or have been homeless alongside professional actors. It is also inspired by true events.

The Nitram actor plays Nick, a solitary young pastor called upon to take over a church in a small West Texas town. We know nothing about his previous life, but we watch him cut his long, unkempt hair until he looks “presentable”—or, at least, the way a leader of a religious congregation, however small, is expected to look. Welcomed by the locals with their characteristic Southern hospitality, he soon runs into trouble. When he learns about a group of homeless people living in the woods, he tries to approach them, only to be met with an initially aggressive rejection. It is immediately clear that the relationship between these people and the rest of the town is not a good one. They distrust the church and the authorities, too.

But little by little, thanks to his empathy and understanding, Nick gets closer to them and begins to form connections. Everything becomes more complicated when a snow and rainstorm destroys the makeshift camp where they have been living, leaving them exposed to the cold, the elements and the threat of illness. Nick returns to town and gathers the community in the school gymnasium, asking them to let the homeless use the facilities as shelter until the weather improves. To his surprise, with only a few exceptions, most people object. Some do so quite vehemently. As a solution, Nick ends up bringing the group to the church, where they sleep on the pews and intent to spend the winter.

Down the Arm of God focuses on the increasingly fraught relationship between these two sides of the same community. The homeless group is a diverse collection of war veterans, pregnant women, people dealing with physical and mental health issues, and alcoholics. Yet, with few exceptions, they do their best to make the church at least somewhat livable despite the difficulties. The congregation, which initially tolerates the situation with a degree of condescension, soon begins to show a harsher, more intolerant side: «they are dirty, they smell, they should get jobs, they should go somewhere else». Nick, alternately incredulous and appalled by the cruelty of these supposedly Christian people, begins to question his place in the community. From there, things only become more complicated.

The performances by non-professional actors who actually live or have lived in these circumstances give Peter Brunner’s film a raw honesty it would otherwise lack. In its first hour—the best part of the movie—the director of To the Night (2018), also starring Landry Jones, takes the time to introduce us to their personal stories, getting inside their lives through conversations and shared experiences. Almost like a docufiction, this section establishes the relationships between Nick and the group—professional actress India Marie Cross plays Raven, the woman who tries to keep everyone organized—as they gradually overcome their fears and accept the pastor’s unusual and deeply humanitarian offer.

Brunner—a director who, according to his biography, studied under Michael Haneke—is less successful in his somewhat rudimentary depiction of the townspeople, who move rather quickly from expressing their doubts to becoming openly aggressive and violent toward the “new arrivals” and toward Nick for taking them in and trying to reintegrate them into society. Mena Suvari and Nick Stahl play a particularly cruel couple who turn against the homeless, while others, including the town mayor and an Afghanistan veteran, take their anger out on him. Nick, meanwhile, has a troubled past of his own, which gradually comes to light and is revealed more clearly as the situation becomes increasingly dramatic.

Although the film’s third act doesn’t quite live up to the hour or so that precedes it—the writing becomes more obvious, the confrontations more predictable, and the whole thing increasingly takes on the shape of a Western—Down the Arm of God succeeds not only in offering an honest portrait of homelessness and the cruelties they have to endure, but also of the way they are viewed and mistreated by the residents of this and countless other communities. Some of the opposition does become rather clichéd (at one point there is a protest against the homeless and one demonstrator holds up a “White Lives Matter” sign), and the conflicts eventually turn violent in a way more typical of a conventional thriller. Even so, there is a truth in these bodies and faces that transcends the screenplay’s weaknesses.

At a time when homelessness is growing around the world—and becoming particularly dangerous during harsh winters—Brunner’s film is moving in its call for empathy, understanding and solidarity in a world that seems increasingly determined to ignore, marginalize and even mistreat those who have been unable—or, for whatever reason, are temporarily unable—to have a home in which to lay their heads. And you don’t have to travel to the heart of Texas to find situations like these. Even the cruel city government where I live asks residents to report people sleeping on their streets and proudly boasts about “eradicating” them. We are living through complicated times.