'The Devil All the Time' is less than the sum of its parts

The brilliance of the late Robert Altman's ensemble movies is that you never felt like you didn't get enough character development in his sprawling, interconnected narratives. It's hard to do, get well-rounded snapshots of people as part of a thematic pastiche, but he did it -- again and again.

Many filmmakers have tried and failed to pull of the same magic trick in his wake and the makers of The Devil All the Time, based on a novel of the same name by Donald Ray Pollock, can be added to the list.

It has many elements of a great film -- excellent period details and production values, a stacked (and very white cast) of up-and-coming or newly established stars (like Robert Pattinson and Tom Holland) and some strikingly staged sequences, but it doesn't amount to much since we never really establish an emotional connection to anything that's happening.

The movie is a cavalcade of depravity: corrupt preachers, cops and politicians, serial killers, and sexual deviants. It's a story about violence and evil, that's meant to be in the stark Cormac McCarthy tradition but it doesn't have the gravitas or the grit of a No Country for Old Men, even if its violence can be effective and appropriately gnarly.

It's wrapped in drawling narration supplied by the book's author that helps give the movie some episodic structure but not much of a point of view. I'm actually a fan of voiceover narration -- when it's used well. For instance, I have always loved the slightly detached sarcasm of the narrator of Barry Lyndon. But in this film it almost seems to be there just to make sure we can keep the various plotlines of the film in order. 

It can be a frustrating watch since several of the film's threads could have made for an interesting movie on its own -- like a subplot involving Jason Clarke and Riley Keough, who pick-up men so Clarke can photograph them sleeping with his wife and then murder. Their scenes have a tension and unpredictability I appreciate, but they feel like an aside.

Tom Holland struggles mightily to subvert his Spider-Man babyface to play a rugged badass, while Robert Pattison tries to breathe new life into the cliched role of the crooked clergymen (with an almost cartoonish Southern accent), but to what end?

What is the mission statement of this movie? It opens well, with a story about a man whose faith is tested and is proven irrational when faith comes crashing down on him, but it's really just a long trailer for an even longer film that plays a little like southern gothic chic.

It's not boring but I have grown a little cynical about these films that mistake brutality for profundity. The inevitably of death, and the senselessness of cruelty are subjects worth interrogating but not in a way that's this cursory and somehow methodical at the same time.