DVD Review: The Killer Inside Me

Michael Winterbottom’s notorious thriller is troubled, frustrating, mystifying.

After more than two decades of filmmaking, Michael Winterbottom remains one of the most fascinating and yet frustrating directors working. His films are routinely energetic, ambitious, stuffed with memorable performances – actors routinely do their best work when participating in one of his projects – and his subject matter is never less than inventive and intriguing. So why aren’t his films, as complete works, better than they are?

The Killer Inside Me continues the recurrent trend that began with 1997′s Welcome To Sarajevo and continues through a half-dozen or so good-but-not-great films including 24 Hour Party People, The Claim, and Code 46. A great idea for a film, handsomely and adroitly cast, it never quite rises to its potential but instead languishes in unresolved issues and ideas that don’t quite work out to their best conclusions. It’s hobbled, too, by an abrupt and clumsy tonal shift midway through the third act that leaves its ending particularly disappointing.

It’s based on a novel by Jim Thompson, whose other works – The Getaway, The Grifters, After Dark, My Sweet - stand stark even in the bleak company of the hard-boiled genre. The story centers on Lou Ford, a soft-spoken sheriff’s deputy in small-town Centreville, Texas of the 1950s. Ford is amiable, gentlemanly, and deliberate, obedient to his alcoholic boss (Tom Bower) and content to live in the house left him by  his late doctor father. Some time previous Ford’s adoptive brother died under mysterious circumstances, following lurid innuendo concerning his activities with a child.

When Ford is assigned to investigate the activities of local prostitute Joyce Lakeland (Jessica Alba), his barely restrained sadism begins to percolate. Actually a sociopath comfortable with his own amorality but happy to disguise it beneath a mild-mannered veneer, he embarks on an affair of rough sex with Joyce while romancing, ostensibly for the sake of appearances, playful but adoring town debutante Amy Stanton (Kate Hudson.) Ford tells himself, and the audience through first-person voiceover narration, that he loves Joyce but can use her to bring about the revenge he’s wanted since his brother’s death.

That revenge involves manipulating her into conning the son (Jay R. Ferguson) of the local construction magnate (Ned Beatty) that Ford blames for his brother’s death. But the revenge is only the excuse, it seems, for Ford to murder the magnate’s son in cold blood and then savagely beat Joyce to death, under a cover of framing the son for her murder but keeping the cash that the son believed would allow him to skip town with Joyce. The resulting brutal violence is central to the film’s greatest ambition but also creates its many failings.

The long, anguished scene in which Ford pummels Joyce, and a later similar scene involving Amy, caused a cyclone of complaints upon the film’s premiere at Sundance and elsewhere, and not without reason – they’re almost impossible to watch without revulsion. Joyce’s death manages, in brutal clarity, to reverse the moral center of the film, turning Ford from interesting if unsympathetic anti-hero (we get small, flashback hints to his true nature several times in the film) to contemptible villain. Affleck seldom changes the temperature of his performance, keeping Ford at the same spacey, plodding cool in almost every scene.

Cleverly, Thompson’s story – adapted by writer/director John Curran – builds a supporting cast that can slide into the vacuum of sympathy created by Ford’s curdling: the well-intentioned if useless sheriff, his earnest deputy (Matthew Maher), a county attorney (Simon Baker), the construction boss suspicious of Ford’s role in the killing, the union organizer who often seems to see through Ford’s “bullshit”; and of course Amy herself, who plans to elope with Ford in the immediate future.

But except for Amy, none of the characters is given the opportunity to establish themselves as presences in the story independent of their relation to Ford; they are not persons themselves so much as types that Ford must evade or manipulate in his day-to-day existence, and in their normalcy they seem scant opposition to his ruthlessness. That’s probably exactly the point Thompson’s book wanted to make (I haven’t read it), that normal civilization is powerless in the face of true evil  – a lesson that’s apparently common in Texas, the original no country for old men. Still, that basic imbalance effectively allows Ford to gambol through the film with no clear threat of retribution. It’s frightening, but not in a way that’s especially rewarding to watch.

Winterbottom’s intention may have been to disconcert the viewer rather than entertain all along; there’s plenty to suggest that the entire purpose is to repulse rather than garner sympathy for Ford’s monstrous depravity. If only the last twenty minutes or so held up that level of malicious drive. Following Amy’s death, music and staging coincide to bring a bizarre and awkward sense of camp to several scenes, including a poorly staged chase sequence through town whose indifferent conclusion grows annoying upon reflection. The equally off-putting ending, rife with contortions that set up weirdly symbolic overlays to the story but that run all over the place tonally, virtually collapses the preceding story into dissolution.

Regarding the performances, Ford is a dangerous part to undertake, and it’s hard to imagine other contemporary leading men hazarding such a risky commitment (imagine Brad Pitt doing something like this.) But Affleck’s determination to make his character casually sociopathic keeps the emotional intensity at a level less than what it needs to bring the film. He also never allows much insight into Ford’s inner psyche, and though again that may have aligned with Thompson or Winterbottom’s design ultimately it makes his performance an important question mumbled in a loud room.

The two women are both well cast, if for different reasons. Hudson has made a career of playing the love interest in comedies with the weight of pollen grains, so watching her act both randy and then victimized has a shock value that works forcibly to the film’s advantage. Alba received a lot of negative press for her performance, including a Razzie award, but she’s adequate and at times even pitiably affecting in a part that doesn’t allow her to do much except get ravished or beaten. Of the male co-stars, Bill Pullman steals scenes (as usual) as a lawyer who comes to Ford’s rescue once the plot steers itself into a corner. Maher, an actor who ought to be seen more, is compelling as the last deputy left  in town to represent real law.

Speaking of the film’s graphic violence against women, Winterbottom told The New York Daily News that the story exists in a “kind of parallel world” that he was “drawn into.” Yet for as much texture as the film has – it’s a visceral, immersive world that irrepressibly sucks you in – there’s almost nothing by way of context or theory to explain Ford’s implacable rage and madness. The resultant displays come off too casual, too callous, as a direct consequence.  And perhaps because the violence is savaged upon women who love and who need to be loved, audiences will expect and for that matter probably have a right to expect closure or at least insight. The women’s performances are good enough that they’ll want to know why; in the absence of such the banality of Ford’s evil inevitably blurs with a lack of articulation of the film’s – and its creators’ – ideas.

They’ll come away disappointed. Ultimately full of problems and dark promise alike, The Killer Inside Me takes us through the life and mind of someone almost impossibly evil but loses itself before offering anything like a way out.

- Michael Kabel

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Seven More Crime Classics from the 70s

The rest of the best from the golden age of gritty crime thrillers.

The 70s were not an optimistic time, and most American cinema carried and echoed that cynicism. Cop films were no exception, eschewing the traditional white hat/black hat simplicity in place since the 1950s in favor of darker shades of gray among its cops and crooks alike. Looking past the “D’Antoni Trilogy” of Bullitt, The French Connection, and The Seven-Ups, movie theatres of the era were held down by dozens of gritty police and crime thrillers, many of which rivaled or in some ways surpassed the blueprint those three films delineated. Known for their realistic settings, amoral protagonists, and meticulous attention to violent detail, the era’s crime films were often as bleak and unremitting as the real-life stories that sometimes inspired them.

The following list includes films that exemplified the crime genre. The edges of film genre are seldom clear and almost never straight, but the list includes films of a certain recognizable kind but deliberately omits others. There’s no question that Chinatown, for example, was one of the 70s best films. Including it as a crime film, however, both sells its considerable achievements short while ignoring the criteria of texture and mood that defines most “crime” films of the period. Likewise for other films such as Taxi Driver, Murder On The Orient Express, The Godfather and its sequel, The Parallax View, Dog Day Afternoon, and no doubt many others.

In chronological order:

Shaft (1971): The decade saw the rise (and fall) of the blaxploitation sub-genre, typically low-budget efforts that brought the new cop movie morality to the inner city, a locale where in the real world crime and corruption were reaching catastrophic levels. Films  including Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Dolemite, Black Caesar,  and Super Fly pitted strong black men against, alternately, evil white people, crooks, mobsters, revolutionaries and politicians.

The mack daddy of them all, however, was 1973′s Shaft, an eye-popping swirl of color, attitude, and especially violence. Richard Roundtree played the titular private detective on the trial of a local kingpin’s kidnapped daughter, bucking criminals and cops with help from a Black Panthers-like revolutionary cell. Touted as “The Black James Bond,” Roundtree reprised the role of John Shaft in three sequels, though none match the original. (Note that the following is a fan-made trailer.)

 

Dirty Harry (1971): A film that’s become somewhat archetypal over time, Don Siegel (The Killers) directed this ultra-violent crime thriller about rogue San Francisco Police Inspector “Dirty”  Harry Callahan, a role that after thirty-eight years and four diminishing sequels has become synonymous with star Clint Eastwood’s public and screen image. The plot puts the remorseless Callahan against a serial sniper loosely based on the real-life Zodiac killer, then at the height of his reign of terror over the Bay Area.

The story is straightforward and the characterizations rote, but Siegel keeps the mounting tension taut as piano wire. Callahan and “Scorpio” are both unstoppable objects, making their inevitable collision loom mercilessly over the audience. At leat the trailer gives fair warning:

The Getaway (1972): Mastermind criminal Doc McCoy (Steve McQueen) is paroled from a Texas prison on the condition that he plan a bank robbery for corrupt businessman Jack Benyon (Ben Johnson). One of the businessman’s goons kills a security guard during the heist, and Doc and his wife Carol (Ali McGraw) flee to the border at El Paso while eluding pursuit by Benyon and the killer. McQueen and MacGraw became real-life lovers during filming despite her marriage to producer Robert Evans, making them a kind of 70s Brangelina. Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch) directs the sleek, swift-moving thriller purely for the sake of entertaining the audience, who loved the palpable chemistry between its stars. A 1994 remake starring then-married couple Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger flopped.

Serpico (1973): Director Sidney Lumet (Twelve Angry Men) returned to the theme of police corruption time and again through his career, though probably none of his works equal the haunting intensity of this true-life story of whistle-blowing narcotics detective Frank Serpico. Shunned and eventually set up for a near-fatal shooting by his NYPD colleagues, Serpico (Al Pacino) personified the righteous outcast persona typical of 70s film protagonists, as the film’s grim ending perfectly demonstrates. Pacino was only just coming into his commanding screen presence, and the on-location shots of a crime-devastated New York showcase Lumet’s attention to precise realism. The two reteamed for the bank heist classic Dog Day Afternoon two years later.

 

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973): The poster on the left isn’t meant to be cheap -  it’s just that this film about the working class ranks of the Boston underworld is actually that stark and bleak. Faced with an impending jail sentence, low-level hood Eddie Coyle (the great Robert Mitchum, kicking off a late-career resurgence) agrees to snitch a gang of home invaders to the feds, only to learn that the gang was already caught that same morning. Meanwhile the Irish Mob, believing Coyle was actually the informant, sends his friend Dillon (Peter Boyle) to kill him in retribution. Mitchum and Boyle, two consummate pros, build their characters comfortably and with unforced but nonetheless mounting tension, while great turns by unjustly forgotten character actors such as Richard Jordan, Steven Keats and others fill in the grimy, desperate world they inhabit. Peter Yates (Bullitt) directs, and the film will see a long-anticipated DVD release this May.

The Conversation (1974): Francis Ford Coppola made this smart conspiracy yarn between the first two Godfather sagas, distilling the decade’s paranoia and fear of technology into an intense character study chock full of irony. Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, a surveillance expert who leads a life of deliberate isolation from others while keeping morally removed from the consequences of his discoveries. Haunted by a previous mistake that left three people dead, he becomes obsessed with the meaning of his latest taped investigation, ultimately finding himself the target of eavesdropping and pursuit for reasons not immediately apparent. The script was written in the mid-60s, yet the film saw release during the height of the Watergate scandal. A pre-Star Wars Harrison Ford makes a rare screen appearance as the heavy.

The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three (1974): A British mercenary (Robert Shaw) and his three henchmen hijack a crowded New York subway train and demand a million dollar ransom. A Transit Authority detective (Walter Matthau) scrambles to stall the gang, which includes former subway system employees who know how to exploit the weaknesses in its safety features. Directed by veteran TV director Joseph Sargent, Matthau and the versatile cast imbue the film with a cynical New York humor, while Quentin Tarantino lifted the hijackers’ color-coordinated code names for his Reservoir Dogs. A remake, starring Denzel Washington in the Matthau role and John Travolta as the hijacker’s ringleader, is scheduled for release this June.

- Michael Kabel
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DVD Review: W.

Oliver Stone’s flawed biopic of the deeply flawed president debuts on DVD next week.

A maddeningly skittish and ultimately failed film biography, W. finds its development continually undermined by shifting tones and an oft-sagging pace. Worse, in trying to determine which events of the president’s life to depict, director Oliver Stone settles on what feels like a sampling of parts that never quite gel into a coherently articulated point. The end result is a film that’s more mix disc than album, more memory album than narrative.

W. begins, in what is probably intended as a symbolic prelude, with the young George’s (Josh Brolin) hazing into a Yale fraternity. Despite immersion in freezing water and severe intoxication, he’s able to remember an astounding number of his would-be frat brothers’ names. It’s a perfunctory scene, though it manages to establish Bush’s talent for winning over dubious audiences with great alacrity and charm.  When shortly thereafter his then-Congressman father (James Cromwell) is compelled to bail “Junior” out of a New Jersey prison, it sets in motion the film’s key narrative struggle between Bush’s freewheeling character and his barely-understood ache for his father’s approval. Stone uses that tug of war as a touchstone to show the passing of time, matching W’s misadventures in business and public office with the elder Bush’s political rise and fall.

The bulk of the rest of the film, also told in flashback and flash-forward structure, details the events leading up to the American invasion of Iraq. Bush works with but seems often content to take at face value the advice and research of Defense Scretary Donald Rumsfeld (Scott Glenn) and his Deputy Paul Wolfowitz (Dennis Boutsikaris), Vice President Dick Cheney (Richard Dreyfus), successive Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice (Jeffrey Wright and Thandie Newtwon), and CIA chief John Tenet (Bruce McGill). Bush plays the role of manager to their appraisals and ends each meeting with a coach-like “good meeting” followed by a moment of prayer. Always in the background, like a true-life Grima Wormtongue, lurks adviser Karl Rove (Toby Jones), dispensing advice with false humility and fawning praise.

In the film (though no doubt the actual circumstances were more complicated) Bush finds religion following a cardiac arrest while jogging. He gives up his heavy drinking in favor of a purpose driven life under the guidance of Reverend Earle Hudd (Stacey Keach), a pastor Stone portrays in cherubic backlighting and affectionate soft-focus. Faith thereafter guides the cinematic Bush’s decisions, most notably his 1999 “call” to run for President; but darker drives compel him even more, especially the need for his father’s approval but also to compensate for the elder Bush’s 1991 decision to pull out of Iraq without deposing Saddam Hussein. Stone never offers a solution or theory explaining what effect two such diverse compulsions might have on the leader of the free world. In time – and at 131 minutes, the time is somehow long though not long enough – that lack of tension hollows out what might serve as the film’s center.  

If its performances weren’t so good, the film itself would be much less. Brolin inhabits Bush admirably, finding sympathy in his privileged life. Dreyfus’ Cheney is both arrogant and reptilian, while Cromwell brings perhaps undeserved stature to George H.W. Bush. Wright gives Powell a surprising vulnerability, whom Stanley Weiser’s script uses as the sole and diminishing voice of reason in the buildup to the Iraqi invasion. Unfortunately Thandie Newton’s turn as Rice is more impersonation than performance, and Jones (Notorious) seems to have not yet rinsed all the Truman Capote out of his acting technique. Elizabeth Banks isn’t given enough to do as First Lady Laura Bush, though she makes the most of her time in giving Laura the gravitas and affection that anchor her often-impulsive husband to Earth.

“The absence of evidence,” Rumsfeld exclaims in a crucial scene, “is not evidence of absence.” Such wisdom ironically thumbnails the film’s fatal flaw. Stone leaves out much of what’s made Bush’s presidency now officially the least popular in seventy years, including among other self-destructing moments the Hurricane Katrina debacle and the infamous My Pet Goat photo op the morning of September 11. Why the film avoids such moments is left unclear. Would their inclusion impair the tightrope objectivity Stone seems determined to put forward? Obviously detailing all the events and calamities of Bush’s monumentally controversial administration would require a series of films. But the omission of 9/11 and Katrina comes across as careening around cornerstone events. By way of comparison, would a biography of Franklin Roosevelt omit Pearl Harbor, or the Great Depression? Could a biography of Lincoln ignore the Emancipation Proclamation?

Stone rose to the top tier of American directors in the 1980s following a trio of very good films (Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street) that were ferocious in their attempts to spur public discourse of historically significant events. His track record since has been spotty, though no less ambitious. Platoon, his best film, benefited from historical perspective, and maybe that distance is what’s missing here. Or maybe not. Though missing the heavy-handed pathos of 1995′s Nixon, W. stills fails to make a compelling case either for sympathy or damnation. Better films than this will likely be made of America’s least popular president. It’s probably just going to take a while for them to arrive.

-Michael Kabel
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(Note: this review originally appeared for the film’s theatrical release.)