WHEN is Good overwhelming? When Evil is doubly enthralling and enticing. Thus glides before us an old tale about how the bad always appears with the good, or how the works of the devil consort with the achievements of angels.
A parable of cosmic proportion takes place in some towns in the US. It is 1957 and good men are back from a war whose dark sides will remain for a long time tucked in with the default memories of heroism. It was after all America, the land of the free and home of the brave. War is over and it is time to start anew.
The landscape is innocence: tall forests, pristine clear waters. Quiet towns have inhabitants who are linked by common genealogy. Peace has come; the possibilities for human societies are infinite.
Against this backdrop, the story of The Devil All the Time is told. It is the story of fate.
It is also the story of Marine Willard Russell who fought during the Second World War, and is now going home to Coal Creek in West Virginia.
In Solomon Islands, Willard is on a mopping-up operation with a fellow marine when he encounters a ghastly scene of a marine on a rough cross on a burning hill. The man has been left by the Japanese to die. When the soldiers come near him, he moves and out comes from his mouth flies.
This scene will never leave Willard’s mind.
On his way home to his mother in Ohio, Willard stops by a diner where he meets Charlotte. She will become Willard’s wife. In the diner, Willard is about to take a table when another man gets to that place ahead of him. Perhaps recognizing Willard as a man fresh from the warfront, the other man gives up the table.
That man will turn up in the latter part of the story. But at that moment, the “kind” man is served by this lovely waitress, Sandy, who becomes his wife. The tandem would be known down the road as the “shooter” and “bait.”
Between Clark and Sandy—or, as the story unfolds, with them—is Sandy’s brother, Sheriff Lee.
Home with his family, Willard goes to a small church with his mother. He is introduced to a woman, Helen, who is expected by Willard’s mother to be married off to him. The mother during the war has prayed to God that if his son were spared, then Helen should be the mother of his children. In this film, prayers become pacts.
In the church, a young evangelical preacher displays his charisma in a fiery speech that goes beyond fire and brimstone. This man, Roy, is affecting because he disturbs the churchgoers. When he talks of fears and how he overcomes them, Roy demonstrates his approach with the supreme magic of a carnival barker. A bottle of spider is opened and Roy pours all its grisly contents over his face.
It is barely 3o minutes into the film but The Devil All the Time has already opened boxes and boxes of sins and trepidations that will put to shame good ole Pandora.
A father finds a home for his wife and their son. He builds a cross on a clearing behind that house. This father brings his son to the Cross and commands him to pray. He asks him to pray when he is bullied. In the middle of the night, he brings his son’s dog and shoots it. He offers this dog to God. The dog is important to his son and thus is a fitting bloody sacrifice to the divine. Another man brings his wife for a walk, prays over the poor woman and quickly stabs her by the neck. The woman dies but the man screams to God to bring her back to life. Meanwhile, a man finds out his sweet wife has a terminal disease. When the wife dies, he stabs himself in front that old rugged cross. In the clearing, a son finds a father dead while Kitty Kallen’s voice soars with the maudlin sweet lines from her song “Little Things Mean a Lot:” “Blow me a kiss from across the room. Say I look nice when I’m not.”
The son grows up and lives with his stepsister. They attend a church service where a preacher dressed in blue jacket and white fancy shirt worthy of the tackiest prom works the crowd of believers. This preacher has charm. He enters the life of a young girl bullied. She soon is pregnant and the evangelist is the father. Her brother kills the preacher; she commits suicide.
The young man delivers the comeuppance upon the tandem of killers murdering their target the two call their model. The young man hitches a ride with a hippie and, unlike the proverbial cowboy who rides into the sunset, falls sleep. What does he dream? Perhaps the goodness of the world because he is the only good person in this narrative? It is 1965.
True enough, those little things, those little lives mean a lot. In the end, we pray that the fact of lives woven across each other is a parable if only to assure us it does not happen to us, or to others. But, in the seemingly disjointed biographies in this story are written down an autobiography of how we, in our vileness and goodness, work around each other’s life.
The Devil All the Time is filled with small lives and huge destinies, acted out by actors filling the screen with a pageantry of characters that would have been caricatures in another filmmaker’s hand—from the little boy, Michael Banks Repeta, playing the nine-year-old Arvin Russel; to Haley Bennet as Charlotte, Arvin’s mother and Willard’s wife; from Mia Wasikowska as Helen to Kristin Griffith as Emma Russell, Arvin’s grandmother.
It must be said though that the film tenses up with the magisterial presences of Bill Skarsgård as Willard Russell, Robert Pattinson as Reverend Preston Teagardin, and Tom Holland as Arvin.
Bill Skarsgård’s Willard shatters our notion of a quiet man as somebody at peace with himself and the world. As the former soldier who constructs a cross near his home, he bears the burden of so many lives that we cannot but forgive him in the end.
Pattinson’s Preston and his duplicity as a preacher and pervert is disturbing because he makes that character a fixture in the landscape of believers who are either naïve or naturally good. And, yes, he makes us forget he once was a box-office vampire.
Who would think that Tom Holland is capable of depicting a brooding soul? In a society rendered devoid of that frail sociological tool called “human agency,” Holland’s young man is the true hope on a horizon that is barely delineated.
But this film benefits from the tight direction by Antonio Campos from a screenplay cowritten with his brother Paulo Campos. Campos is noted for his feature-length debut Afterschool, which had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008. Music is by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans; with cinematography by Lol Crawley. Sofía Subercaseaux is the editor.
The Devil All the Time is based on Donald Ray Pollock’s novel of the same name. The author also is The Narrator—the overall consciousness—in the film. The Devil All the Time had its release in select North American theaters on September 11, 2020, and digitally on Netflix in September 2020.