The Devil All The Time and The God All Along
I will leave proper film criticism to proper film critics. In my humble blog of all-around flailing, I’d like to laser-focus on a single aspect of the movie—the narration.
The Devil All The Time is a gritty, grimy, and all the other buzzword adjectives Southern Gothic, a tale of the never-ending cycle of violence and the soul-breaking search for God told by a Coenesque omniscient narrator—but with a twist.
The Story Department defines the omniscient POV as “a point of view outside any of the story’s characters” and warns that it shouldn’t be used in movies, for it doesn’t allow the viewers to empathize with the characters by way of creating a certain distance from them. It’s just bad for drama, the website argues.
Despite this advice, however, many movies employ such narration quite successfully and, without any doubt, pretty dramatically. The Devil All The Time takes it one step further—and invites a very special voice to do the voice-over.
In one of the books on writing craft, the author suggests that writing is basically daydreaming a movie and then retelling it to your readers. Antonio Campos, the director of The Devil All The Time, invites Donald Ray Pollock, the author of the book the film is based on, to make the writing advice a reality.
The omniscient narrator is often described as having “the God’s view”. He’s all-seeing and all-knowing, just like, you know, God. In the director’s words, “His voice is very powerful. We needed a narrator to guide us, to connect all these pieces and give us a sense that there is something bigger at play here. It had to be Don.” Do you feel a near-religious reverence here or is it just me?
Such a narrator is extra-diegetic by definition, but in The Devil All The Time he transcends to another meta level, leaving the confines of the medium altogether. Some media reviews say that Pollock’s involvement confers some legitimacy to the adaptation or gives it a sense of authenticity. I’d say it changes the meaning of the events depicted within the frame entirely.
The first thing we hear as the movie begins is Pollock’s slow Southern drawl, which might be the only genuine accent in the entire story. Coincidentally, it’s also the only real voice in it. Everyone else is just characters. Everything happening on the screen is a daydream, straight out of the writer’s mind.
The entire movie is concerned with the questions of God and faith. On the surface, its main focus when looking for the elusive God is Tom Holland’s character, whose youthfully innocent features look endearingly confused both by the violence around him and the one he perpetrates—and perpetuates—himself. But he’s only an agent of God, not God himself.
Like with all great epiphanies, it’s not until the credits roll that you realize: God was there all along—and he was writing a book.
