Frailty (2001) – Dad In The Shed With An Ax

Article first published as Movie Review: Frailty (2001) – Dad With An Ax In The Shed on Blogcritics.

Frailty (2001) starts when a young man (Matthew McConaughey) walks into the offices of the FBI and starts telling Agent Doyle (Powers Boothe) about a recent rash of murders. That is the start of a long and twisted tale of the childhood of two young boys and their father (Bill Paxton).

Some of the story is told by the young man who introduces himself as Fenton Meiks. He claims to know the identity of a serial killer who calls himself “God’s Hand”. He says it is his brother Adam (Levi Kreis). When the agent asks him why he would think such a thing he starts telling the agent of his father and brother and his disturbing childhood.

The young Fenton (Matt O’Leary) grows up taking care of his kid brother Adam (Jeremy Sumpter) after the death of their mother. His father (Bill Paxton) is just another regular Joe working dad trying to take care of his two sons and he seems to be an honestly good father, hard working and normal. That is until one night when he wakes his two sons up saying he’s just had a visitation from an angel and he has been instructed that they are supposed to be demon killers, God’s Hand in retribution. This is very much an old testament God, one of fire and vengeance and flaming swords.

The angel delivers a list of demons to be slain and leads the father to the weapons they are supposed to use – an ax, a length of pipe and a pair of worker’s gloves. Young Fenton thinks his dad’s going nuts. Adam, on the other hand, takes to the new work with enthusiasm, supporting their father and telling his brother that he can see the demons when his father puts hands on them to reveal their sins.

Fenton resists with everything he has. He tells his father to get help, to stop killing people, but the dad just blithely keeps on reassuring him that they’re not really people at all, they are demons, and they are doing the Lord’s work. The more Fenton resists, the more dad tries to make him see the light.

Most of this is told from young Fenton’s perspective. The two young actors, and Matt O’Leary particularly, does a very good job of it. His defiance, the moral core, his fear and his loss of faith are pitch perfect and you really feel for him. He is caught in an impossible situation and he can’t get out. When he finally breaks down and goes to get the sheriff, dad kills the lawman and they bury him in the rose garden where they bury all their victims. All the while dad cries and tells Fenton it’s his fault he’s had to actually kill a human. Fenton spits at him that he’s killed plenty.

After that dad winds up locking the Fenton in a basement they’ve dug under their shed to have somewhere to take the demons when they are about to be slain. Dad keeps Fenton there until he’s weak from fatigue and starvation and that makes him see the light. When he comes out of the basement he’s completely with the plan.

Things are, however, not what they seem. When are they ever?

This is really low key, up close and personal horror, told in the tradition of Stephen King centering on the loss of innocence of the very young, Fenton is ten and Adam seven when all this starts. The long flashbacks show corruption at the very central core of these boys’ lives when their father goes completely bananas and drags them in to his delusion. Or so it might seem.

Bill Paxton plays the dad with the kind of finesse that actually keeps him from becoming and out-and-out monster. He believes in what he’s doing, all the way down to the particulars of using the ax the angel led him too. He is unwavering and he keeps saying “it’s for your own good” to Fenton when he punishes him for not believing.

The ending has a major twist that I don’t think I should reveal for those interested in watching this movie. It’s one of those things that either work on a viewer, or completely miss the mark. It’s mostly a question of how much you can go along with the narrative. I think it works well within the premise of the story, but for me personally, the flashback scenes are stronger.

This is Bill Paxton’s directorial debut and he does a good job of it, the tendency for actor-cum-directors to focus on the actors performances is always rewarding to watch, because invariably there is a certain depth of character portrayal that makes a movie like this, which is basically Southern Gothic, better than they would have been in the hands of someone focusing on the gore.

Frailty (2001) directed by Bill Paxton who also stars as Dad Meiks. Matthew McConaughey (Fenton/Adam Meiks), Powers Boothe (FBI Agent Wesley Doyle), Matt O’Leary (Young Fenton), Jeremy Sumpter (Young Adam), Luke Askew (Sheriff Smalls), Levi Kreis (Fenton Meiks), Alan Davidson (Brad White), Cynthia Ettinger (Cynthia Harbridge), Vincent Chase (Edward March) and Gwen McGee (Operator).

Mule

The 2403rd Star – Dennis Hopper (1936-2010)

Dennis Hopper (1936-2010) passed away the other day. He made it to 74, who would have thought?

The thing about Hopper for me has always been his ability to hook your attention – even when the quality of the movie might not be … well, you know – stellar.

Hopper’s career was chequered, to say the least. You got the feeling that occasionally he just needed to pay the rent, and I can respect that. There’s no shame in working.

When he was good, on the other hand, he was really good. Some performances stand out by a country mile: Easy Rider (1969) and Blue Velvet (1986) being the ones that pretty much everybody remembers.

But there’s also the very young and clean-faced Goon in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and the surprisingly funny Huey Walker in Flashback (1990) opposite Kiefer Sutherland. Hopper’s performance as the father in Rumble Fish (1983) is one of my personal favourites, it seems so effortless. Then again there’s the scene between Hopper and Christopher Walken where they discuss the heredity of being Sicilian in True Romance (1993) which still gives me a big happy. Apocalypse Now (1979) is one of those performances that makes perfect sense too, the crazed gleam in Hopper’s eyes probably not all the way an act.

There’s also Hoosiers (1985), The Indian Runner (1991), Paris Trout (1991), The Osterman Weekend (1983), The American Friend (1977) and Basquiat (1996).

Then, on the other hand … Waterworld (1995), Super Mario Bros. (1993) and Firestarter 2: Rekindled (2002) aren’t exactly shining moments for anyone involved. Like I say – sometimes you just got to pay the rent.

Hopper also directed. Easy Rider (1969), The Last Movie (1971) – which was a spectacular failure. Out of the Blue (1980), Colors (1988), Catchfire (1990), The Hot Spot (1990), Chasers (1994) and the short Homeless (2000).

If you look at his career as an actor, he worked with some of the very best directors, and if you look at what he did as a director he worked with some spectacular actors. Directors include Sam Peckingpah, Robert Altman, David Lynch, Sean Penn, Julian Schnabel, Francis Ford Coppola, Nicholas Ray, George Romero and Wim Wenders. That’s a whole hell of a lot of talent all around.

Hopper also collected modern art and exhibited his own photography and painting.

Squandered talent always kind of angers me and Hopper was lucky in a way that he didn’t fall from grace completely, succumbing to substance abuse early in his career. He did abuse his fare share of substances there for a while, though, and got a sharp awakening and cleaned up his act.

Some actors have this ability to tap into a real dark streak, mainlining something close to evil, and Hopper is one of them. He has been the good guy too, the tough cop, all that, but he is just more in command of the stage when the darkness bleeds through.

Like with most creative souls there’s a restlessness, a sense that there is never world enough, or time. A feeling that you have to rage against the dying of the light. In his best moments Hopper gave the viewer all that and a feeling that there was an active intelligence at work behind it.

I asked around amongst my less film enthusiastic acquaintances about Hopper when the news of his death became public. I asked what they remembered seeing him in, what they thought of him, and the funny thing to me was that no one seemed to like him much. I just went “huh?” because, man I didn’t get that. I guess it makes sense that you don’t like him if all you’ve seen is Blue Velvet, because Booth is not a very likeable guy. Hopper played bad guys, like Booth or Paris Trout, with so much fire and honesty, that it makes sense.

In Apocalypse Now the Photojournalist dances about like a mad monkey on speed, lost in the jungle in so many ways and he delivers the following lines about Kurtz to Marlow: “What are they gonna say about him? What are they gonna say? That he was a kind man? That he was a wise man? That he had plans, man? That he had wisdom? Bullshit, man!”

And there it is.

There was more to him, though.

Hopper’s character Father in Rumble Fish has this lovely dialogue with Rusty James;

-Every now and then, a person comes along, has a different view of the world than does the usual person. It doesn’t make them crazy. I mean… an acute perception, man… that doesn’t, that doesn’t make you crazy.
-Could you talk normal?
-However sometimes… it can drive you crazy, acute perception.
-I wish you’d talk normal ’cause I don’t understand half the garbage you’re saying. You know? You know what I mean?
-No, your mother… is not crazy. And neither, contrary to popular belief, is your brother crazy. He’s merely miscast in a play. He was born in the wrong era, on the wrong side of the river… with the ability to be able to do anything that he wants to do and finding nothing that he wants to do. I mean nothing.

That is one of my favourite pieces of dialogue for whatever strange and intangible reason. It has to do with the setting, the pitch of Hoppers voice and the earnestness, the slight exasperation and the honesty with which he delivers it. Hopper’s character’s rumpled suit, his greasy hair, the stubble and the signs of neglect, all of it tells the story of a man with a sharp intelligence who has fallen from grace and lost his footing due to heartache and heavy drinking.

Hopper doesn’t so much sell a performance as live it.
And that’s how I will remember him.

Mule

The Hitcher – Do we need this ride twice?

Remakes. What a weird notion. I mean, seriously… How often do you hear anyone who has seen the original concede that the remake is better? Has it ever happened? At all?

The Hitcher (1986) was written by Eric Red, directed by Robert Harmon and starred Rutger Hauer, C. Thomas Howell and Jennifer Jason Leigh. I remember getting into what can best be described as an epic argument about this movie with another viewer. It was mainly about the fact that there was never a reason given for why The Hitcher did the things he did. I was fine with that. The other viewer was not.

So, here we are again, twenty years later. Eric Red is involved in the screenplay again, along with Jake Jade Wall. The director is Dave Meyers and the leads are played by Sean Bean (John Ryder), Sophia Bush (Grace Andrews) Zachary Knighton (Jim Halsey) and Neal McDonough (Lt. Estridge).

Jim and Grace are on spring break and they decide to drive Jim’s Oldsmobile 442 to Lake Havasu. On a rainy highway somewhere in New Mexico they pass a stranger who’s car has broken down. Jim wants to stop and help him, Grace does not. Things spin quickly out of control from there on out.

John Ryder focuses on the couple with increasing vehemence, just like in the first movie… And that’s kind of the problem. If you have seen the first one you recognize some of the situations right down to the specifics and it makes me tilt my head and scrunch up my face. I don’t know who the target audience is for this. People who haven’t seen the first one will definitely have a different experience. For those of us who remember Rutger Hauer’s performance there’s the inevitable comparison between his brand of creepy and Sean Bean’s. But you can’t really call the repetition homage, it’s not done with that kind of sensibility. There’s no earthly reason for both Sean Bean’s and Zachary Knighton’s characters to have the same names as the original movies, while Sophia Bush gets a brand new name.

This is one of those movies where the killer just keeps on coming. He can’t be put down other than by a double barrel to the head. In that respect he is like a Terminator. It creates suspense through sheer momentum. You keep expecting him to pop up everywhere and he does, but not the way you think, or in exactly the way you think, but with more carnage. Either way, it’s effective.

Visually, this movie is appealing. The heavy rains and the blasted landscape of the desert both create the kind of isolation that enhances the protagonists vulnerability. The couple are surprisingly endearing and Grace gets to toughen up in some vaguely Thelma-and-Louise way. It feels kind of redundant to go into the whole female in possession of kick-ass boots and big guns here, because it’s just another take on the original story that’s engineered that way to create a twist. So, Jim winds up being the damsel in distress. Maybe it’s just me being jaded, but I don’t really think it makes much of a difference.

This re-make is not enough of an original to really merit any other thought than it being a case of cashing in on an audience that hasn’t seen the first movie, unfortunately. It’s not bad, but it seems to suffer from the kind of amnesia that a smart movie maker can’t really afford to indulge in. I keep thinking “this should be better”, but despite that I don’t feel the need to throw popcorn at my screen.

The Dead Girl

The Dead Girl (2007) directed by Karen Moncrieff stars Toni Collette as Arden, Piper Laurie as Arden’s mother, Giovanni Ribisi (Rudy), Rose Byrne (Leah), James Franco (Derek), Bruce Davidson (Leah’s father), Mary Steenburgen (Leah’s mother), Brittany Murphy (Krista) Josh Brolin (Tarlow), Kerry Washington (Rosetta), Marcia Gay Harden (Melora).

This is a very complicated and carefully told story that unfolds in five chapters. It starts when Arden finds the body of a dead girl in a field in the rural landscape where she lives with her mother. Arden tells the police and becomes a local celebrity which leads to her being asked out on a date by Rudy who works in a grocery store. Arden is played beautifully as someone who is caught in a stifling and cruel relationship with her ailing mother. She breaks free from that and leaves with Rudy.

The next chapter shows Leah, the morgue attendant who is living with the pain of a missing sister, and the effects of that. The story here is about how the various family members are trying to deal with having had the older daughter gone missing without any resolution. They don’t know if she is alive or dead and they don’t know what happened to her. Leah, who is deeply depressed, just wants it all to be over. Through a series of circumstance she believes the dead girl is her sister and that almost frees her until she finds out she was wrong.

The third chapter deals with a woman whose husband goes away on long road trips and the infected, seriously twisted relationship between husband (Nick Searcy) eventually leads to the wife discovering a storage locker where her absentee husband keeps trophies in the form of bloody clothes and jewellery and things of that nature. The wife (Mary Beth Hurt) understands that her husband is a killer and she has to deal with that knowledge somehow.

The fourth chapter shows the mother of the dead girl, Melora (Marcia Gay Harden) trying to understand what happened to her daughter, finding out where she lived, that she worked as a prostitute and that she has a daughter. She works through all this and decides to take care of her granddaughter.

The last chapter shows the dead girl herself, Krista, and her last day. She comes across as a damaged soul in a lot of ways, but she is also stronger than you would think at a first glance, and the viewer gets to see some of that too.

It’s so rare to see a film that actually features women in this way. We’re talking beautiful talent, skilled work and honed dialogue showing actual women as opposed to Barbie dolls, with hard choices to make portrayed with all the depth and fullness that these wonderful ladies are capable of. That alone makes this worth watching. In some ways they are all victims and they all rise above, change their lives and move through the world as best they can.

It’s told in inverted order and without sentimentalism. It’s absolutely fascinating and gut-clenching to watch a performance like Mary Beth Hurts and seeing her make the wrong choice, seeing how poisoned her thinking is from what must be a long and deeply infected relationship. It is a movie about human interaction and all the ways in which women can get caught in bad circumstance just as much as it is a movie about a murder.

Complex, intelligent and completely engrossing without any kind of moral soapbox action this movie gives the manifold leading ladies a chance to show their skills.

How did this movie not win more awards?

Mule

Dahmer

David Jacobson’s Dahmer (2002) starring Jeremy Renner as Jeffrey Dahmer is one of those slightly odd movies that leave you feeling not entirally sure what you’re supposed to be feeling…

The real life Dahmer was arrested in 1991 and convicted of the murders of 17 young men. His criminal record also included earlier crimes of sexual abuse, public drunkenesss, mastrubating in public and so on. He eventually graduated to murder, cannibalism and necrophilia and that’s where you start realising how wrong this film could have gone. It could have been a slasher/horror/blood-and-gore standard. But no.

And that’s why it works.

The story is told in a slightly disjointed way, showing the animal as a younger brute as well as the fully fledged killer who invites a presumptive second victim back to his apartment while he still has his previous victim in the bedroom. Using the same actor for both the younger and older Dahmer means the director has made the choice to show differences in time through composition and colour saturation, plus a general lack of scruffiness in the aperance of the actor in the earlier sequences. This actually works surprisingly well. The static camerashots when showing Dahmer’s youth also create an atmosphere of alienation that works well.

You get the sense that everything carries meaning, and like any good story of alienation everything carries equal menaing. Killing, driving around or having a cup of coffee is treated with equal attention to detail. It creates an overall feeling of unpleasantness. You constantly wait for the other shoe to drop. Renner gives a great performance of an affable guy who hides a brutal killer behind a slow, boyish smile. He has captured the predatory gaze with alarming accuracy.

If you are looking for gore, however, this is not the movie for you. There is some violence, but it is generally treated with due decorum and the more graphic details of Dahmer’s practises, like cannibalism, are left out. Neither do we get any psych 101 answers as to why Dahmer is the way he is, which is a good thing. Presented with his behaviour and some of his own rhetoric on topics of morality the viewer is left to draw his/her own conclusions. The simple answer is that there is no simple answer.

On the other hand you could argue that this way of handling the topic is a bit coy. Everything becomes surface, and it is easier to distance yourself from the action when it is treated with this much decorum. I knew the story beforehand, including some of its viler aspects, and even when knowing what comes next you still don’t have to invest in it – it is easy to take a clinical view of events. I would say it is not nearly as disturbing as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) which has a completely different aesthetic. But it does linger…

Mule