Columbus is a film enamored with frames and spaces. Frames and spaces and the people who walk through them. The ways people talk about those frames and spaces…the way they consider what those angles and between-angles have to do with their lives.
At first we viewers might find ourselves struggling to enter those spaces alongside this film’s Jin and Casey. On the one hand, these two lead characters can be so subdued and laconic in speech that we may accuse them of mumbling their way through this town of Columbus, Indiana. On the other hand, these two characters come to inhabit the spaces of this town in a special way we rarely see on screen. Perhaps we viewers need to slow our pulses so we can meet the rhythm of the lives we are encountering as we watch. We need to decelerate the heartbeat in our ears to meet the rhythm of these conversations, and we need to calm the pulsing in our insatiable eyes to take in these magnificent spaces.
John Cho’s Jin frequently seems adrift in a daze of apathy, and initially that makes us want to disengage from him. As we have time to think about his character, though, we begin to understand how this apathy arises from who he is. We begin to admire that the film allows him to be so unsympathetic and unengaged with his world, and we might come to appreciate this as the antithesis of a Hollywood star turn.
Haley Lu Richardson’s Casey, on the other hand, makes an impression early on despite her quietness. She has us fully engaged even as she barely raises her voice above a soft exhalation. Casey is defined at once by her ordinariness and by the extraordinary ways she is a part of this town of Columbus, Indiana. She insists upon staying in this town even as everyone else marks success by how quickly they can hit the exit door. The way she stays is also quite remarkable. In between shifts at the library, Casey makes her way around the town dreaming, contemplating, and adoring the modernist architecture that frames everything around her. We experience this town and its beauty through her eyes. After a while, we also realize that the town’s beauty has been a healing balm for her through the specific traumas of her life.
Through all of this, Casey comes to define the film as well. Jin, after he crosses paths with Casey in the first act, joins her in her ongoing gaze upon the town and her appreciation of it. We as viewers join Jin as he tags along with Casey. We learn from her life rhythms, her patient watchfulness, and her willingness to see things that everyone else is passing by on the way to the next big thing in their lives. The big things for Casey may be, in part, this architecture and this town she looks upon with such adoration. How many films are careful and considerate enough to be concerned with the kind of “small” and ordinary things that catch Casey’s eyes?
The visual and metaphorical center of the film, which at first glance may strike us as just one of those ordinary things, is a bridge. The pair, as they often do in this film, come across this structure and stop to talk about it…to think about it. The bridge is actually an elevated walkway that crosses a swiftly running stream. In the opposite of their usual routine, Jin is the one to explain what he knows about the building to Casey. He says that the walkway was built as a “literal and metaphoric bridge” which is significant because the building it leads to is a center for mental health care. Right after Jin’s explanation, we see a shot of the water running downstream and then a shot of Jin looking over the edge at the entrance to that walkway. Following that, we see Casey’s Mom Maria faithfully piling cardboard boxes in her warehouse job. (Once we eventually learn where Maria has come from, this ordinary labor takes on a vital significance.)
Jin and Casey are both contemplating crossing over into new territories, while Maria has herself already crossed over. Each of these new territories are places of greater safety and even maybe places of healing. In each case, there are dangers in the crossing. Danger of falling, danger of drowning, danger of losing the way. Just as the patients in the mental health center venture to cross into a place of greater healing, so these characters dare to cross. The crossing may be a labor of love that costs time and certain little deaths that will feel like the spilling of blood. “How long do I stay here and just wait?,” we hear Jin ask his friend Cassandra later in the film’s one other scene in which that bridge reappears. “As long as it takes,” Cassandra says. There is a painful waiting, yet the crossing is a recovery. In fact, we hear the word “recovers” spoken by one of these characters right at the precise moment in that later scene that the whole span of the bridge walkway is revealed onscreen. Then comes a shot of flourishing flowers on the bank of the stream. Recovery and beauty.
Ultimately the film is what it is because of these characters and where they are heading. The buildings themselves are marvels of architecture, but the film is a marvel only because we find ourselves entering these buildings and spaces with Casey and Jin. By film’s end, we have come to know these two characters well enough to be able to truly enter these spaces alongside them. We walk with them, we talk with them, we gaze with them, and we may even cross over the bridge alongside them.
