The British director Terence Davies, whose films connect style to emotion both exquisitely and inventively, is also one of the great cinematic autobiographers. His third feature, “The Neon Bible,” from 1995 (now streaming free on Tubi and Pluto), is a deflected autobiography—it’s an adaptation of a novel written by the teen-age John Kennedy Toole, and it tells the story of the birth of a lonely, troubled boy’s aesthetic sensibility. It’s the first of Davies’s mighty run of expressly literary features. These include “The House of Mirth,” simply one of the best American literary adaptations ever filmed (and it’s not available to stream—hold on to your DVDs), “A Quiet Passion,” and his new film, “Benediction,” a bio-pic of the poet Siegfried Sassoon, which premièred this week, at the Toronto Film Festival, and is scheduled for a U.S. release next year. “The Neon Bible” is also—like all of Davies’s features—a musical, of a personal and original sort. Davies has said that the art that movies most resemble is music. (I agree.) He has spoken of (and, for that matter, autobiographically filmed) the awakening of his own sensibility through the singing—women’s domestic, casual singing—that filled daily life during his childhood, in Liverpool, as well as through the Hollywood musicals that have been his inspirations ever since then. “The Neon Bible” tells the story of a professional singer who bursts into the narrow life of a boy in a small town in the South. The singer is portrayed by one of the greatest of all actors, Gena Rowlands, who takes over the film with passion and style, just as her character does the boy’s life.
“The Neon Bible” is a memory-movie. It’s built entirely as flashbacks from the desolate night train in which the adolescent David (Jacob Tierney), who’s all of fifteen or sixteen, flees his home town and recalls the events that led to his desperate escape. (His deep mood is accompanied by a Glenn Miller deep cut, the chromatic and melodramatic “Perfidia.”) The action is set in the nineteen-forties, from the start of the decade through the end of the Second World War; it begins with the teen’s memories of childhood (young David is played by Drake Bell), when his Aunt Mae (Rowlands) comes to live with him, his mother, Sarah (Diana Scarwid), and his father, Frank (Denis Leary), in their cramped and struggling, monotonous and Depression-stressed household. From the start, Mae is an outsider for her free-spirited manner and the freedom with which she flaunts it. The community is fervently, conservatively religious, and Sarah reproaches her for the bright colors and tight cut of her clothing from the moment she arrives. Frank wants to throw her out, but Sarah—within David’s earshot—says that Mae has nowhere else to go. Mae herself arrives with the bittersweet burden of memory—her career, as a singer with local bands (her crowning glory was playing Biloxi), has tanked, and she’s ended up unemployed, penniless, destitute. What she has left are her press clippings (which she reads to David like a storybook of distant, glorious legend) and her reminiscences—which Davies films with aching romanticism, in a single roving take that drifts from the family’s bare porch to the halcyon stage light in which she performs “How Long Has This Been Going On?” with a jazz band, and back to her current, idle melancholy.
David’s a bullied child, and he forms a deep bond with Mae that further alienates him from schoolmates. Mae summons him to wash her hair; she takes him swanning through town, dashingly calling him Franchot Tone (a star of the time) and herself Jean Harlow. Young David’s dream life is quickly shattered: there’s a clamor near the house, and Frank carries David on his back to observe the tumult, which turns out to be a lynching that the neighbors, all white of course, treat as a festive event. It’s shattered again: while arguing over money, Frank brutally punches Sarah, leaving Mae to care for her and David to fear for her life. With these two events, David passes—onscreen, with a special effect that’s as simple as it is daring—out of childhood and is forced into a premature maturity, a candid recognition of monstrosity at hand and the terrifying urgency of facing up to it. He also, now, becomes Mae’s confidant, and she disabuses him of the visions of her earlier glory and contrasts her love of performing with the degradations of the profession of itinerant musician and of the reckless, pain-filled love life that went with it. (Rowlands plays Mae with her own singular energies—wise to the world yet hopeful and impulsive, burdened by the past yet lurching heedlessly ahead.) David becomes aware of both Mae and his mother as figures in a tragedy in which he’s merely a supporting player but in which, in adulthood, as a man, he’ll be called on to play a role that still remains, to him, obscure.
Then the United States enters the Second World War. Frank goes to war—and the intrusion of history with a capital “H” in the family’s life proves devastating. Davies films the momentous times with a grand yet hypersensitive style to match. Majestically choreographed travelling shots show the town’s men marching to the train that bears them off to war; the spontaneous performance of “Chattanooga Choo Choo” by Mae, dancing with another woman, at a local hall that leads to the reawakening of Mae’s professional ambitions and career prospects; David’s recitation of a poem (by Longfellow) that marks him with a sensibility that, he knows, renders him utterly alien to the town in which he lives. The hectic preaching at a revival meeting (which Davies films with an ardent, rhetorical fascination), the racist and xenophobic political invective on the radio, only intensifies David’s desperation for escape. Yet David remains bound to his town by his responsibility to Sarah, who begins a harrowing descent into mental illness. His own romantic awakening and emotional frustrations, together with an increasing sense of responsibility and confusion about his own place in the world, drive toward an explosive resolution that ultimately forces him to make his way at far too young an age.
Davies films these memories of toil and anguish—of glimmers of aesthetic delight and worldly enticement, of romantic intensity and erotic torment, of the struggle for personal freedom—with slowly swooping images of dreamily choreographed action, in a unique, intricate style that, blending majesty and intimacy, embodies the story’s paradoxes. Davies is a gay man who was raised in a devoutly Catholic community. No less than in his directly autobiographical, Liverpool-based films, he depicts, in the American South, tensions of private self-definition and the air of oppression with a rapturous sense of wonder and a tremulous vulnerability. He turns “The Neon Bible” into a personal story by ricochet, a vision of realities, both appalling and electrifying, of the American culture that refined and expanded his own youthful sensibility—the ambient violence and desperate struggles, the raw survival of noble impulses, the lonely spirit of headstrong adventure, of which imagination itself is composed.
