Old Yorker

  • The Killer Inside Me

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Winterbottom (2010)

    Jim Thompson’s novel was published in 1952 and, according to Wikipedia, the first plans to film it came not much later.  The three main characters are Lou Ford, a twenty-nine-year old deputy town sheriff who’s also a serial killer; a prostitute called Joyce Lakeland; and Amy Stanton, who is Ford’s girlfriend.  Names such as Marlon Brando (for the role of Lou), Marilyn Monroe (Joyce) and Elizabeth Taylor (Amy) were all associated with the project at one time or another.   The Killer Inside Me was eventually filmed in 1976 by Burt Kennedy, with Stacy Keach as Ford, although it doesn’t appear to have made much impression.  During the many years leading up to this remake, Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio are among those who’ve been linked to the main part.  It’s hard either to see Stacy Keach inventing a bland veneer or to imagine either DiCaprio or (to a lesser extent) Pitt managing to convey what’s going on underneath one.   In Gone Baby Gone, Casey Affleck, although he very rarely smiled, was able to suggest interesting differences between the inside and outside of the private detective he played.   Affleck isn’t tall and his neat profile and small, tight mouth give him a mean-spirited quality but, as Lou Ford (and as in Gone Baby Gone), he has a surprising physical magnetism and command of the screen.  His performance is misconceived, though.

    Also according to Wikipedia, in the novel by Thompson (who wrote The Grifters too):

    ‘Ford’s main coping mechanism for his dark urges … is the relatively benign habit of deliberately needling people with clichés and platitudes despite their obvious boredom: “If there’s anything worse than a bore,” says Lou, “it’s a corny bore.”‘

    I got no sense of this from the movie.  Lou seems highly unsociable; he may be boring (Affleck makes him vocally boring anyway) but he’s far from innocuous.  You can believe  some women might find his combination of boyishness and sexual enthusiasm and arrogance attractive.  It’s harder to accept that any of his work colleagues (and he evidently has no male friends outside work) would see or trust him as a regular guy.  Perhaps Michael Winterbottom and John Curran, who wrote the screenplay, are making the point that the people of the small Texan town where the story is set can’t conceive of Lou as anything other than a good chap because he’s one of them – he’s a lawman and his father was a respected local doctor to boot.  He plays and listens to classical music (although the stereotyping of Texans in cinema might make you feel that would raise suspicions in the locals’ minds).  The district attorney, who comes from elsewhere in the county, has doubts about Lou from a much earlier stage than the townspeople.

    Whatever the rationale for Affleck’s Lou looking every inch a psychopath, it’s puzzling that the script doesn’t accommodate it at key points.   When Joyce Lakeland first sets eyes on Ford, she describes him derisively as ‘a boy scout with a sheriff’s badge’ but his saturnine manner doesn’t fit the description.   Later on, the DA, certain that Lou is responsible for the several murders which have occurred and appalled at his insouciance, says exasperatedly, ‘You just sit there, explaining and smiling’.  Ford is unsmiling:  this isn’t even one of the moments at which Affleck’s face cracks a sneer.   Except for a sequence near the end, when various dramatis personae gather in his house (and which I took to be taking place in his imagination), Lou only really smiles when he’s in bed with Joyce or Amy.  Winterbottom and Affleck may want to subvert the idea of an outwardly affable murderer but that idea seems essential to Thompson’s concept.   And the film’s gruesomely literal violence makes the movie less challenging to the audience if Lou is disagreeable.  If he had charm that might at least be disorienting:  we would have to make sense of enjoying his company when he wasn’t expressing his inner self, while recoiling from his terrible acts.    (In a novel written in first-person narrative that challenge is nearly guaranteed.   The reader enters into the world created by the narrator and relies on her or him for information.  Even when voiceover narrative is retained, as it is here, we’re still at a remove from the narrator because he inhabits the world created by the director.)

    Lou is a sadistic killer and a sadistic lover.  It’s plain to see the sexual element in his taking his belt to Joyce Lakeland after she’s got violent with, and stimulated, him on their first meeting.  It seems we’re meant to believe that Ford has been able to keep the killer inside him for a couple of decades before this provoking moment – even though his murderous violence seems to be an extension of the sexual sadism.  The plot synopsis of the book on Wikipedia explains that Lou finally ‘reveals to the reader the full nature of the inner demons that drive his criminal behavior’.   In this adaptation we soon see demonstrations of that behaviour but we never get much of an explanation of it and the graphic nature of the violence tells us very little more about Lou.  After he’s killed Joyce, he seems briefly to try to make himself feel remorse – he’s had an education, he knows that’s what he should feel – and to fail.  His mind flashes back to what he did as a child to another child and he returns to the present with a shudder; but again he seems startled by not feeling too much about it.  In these moments Casey Affleck is very convincing:  he goes beyond the trademark cold-eyed detachment of a screen psychopathic criminal.   I wasn’t completely clear, however, what the boy Lou did to a little girl:  did he murder as well as assault her?  (Whatever he did, it was his older stepbrother who took the rap.)  It’s not just the realistic, protracted violence against women that’s hard to justify in The Killer Inside Me.  The display of naked female flesh seems voyeuristic – we certainly don’t always see it from the protagonist’s point of view.  As a result, the implication that the women enjoy, up to a point, the sexual rough treatment meted out to them by Lou made me all the more uncomfortable.  Presenting flagellation as a kind of vigorous foreplay seems worse when the voyeurism elsewhere in the film suggests that you’re witnessing a sexual fantasy which isn’t just Lou Ford’s.

    The Killer Inside Me is well acted throughout.   The casting of Jessica Alba as the prostitute and Kate Hudson as the respectable girlfriend is effective not least because Hudson has a lewder quality.   In smaller roles, Ned Beatty, Simon Baker, Bill Pullman and Elias Koteas (especially) are all excellent.   Brent Briscoe is a bum-nemesis whose hand Ford burns and who returns to haunt him:  Briscoe overdoes it in the blackmailing scene but his later panic is very good.  A bug-eyed, hare-lipped lawman played by Matthew Maher is a more familiar Texan grotesque – although it works well that his looks are deceptive.  Winterbottom seems to me to have realised the locale fully and naturally (it’ll be interesting to see what American critics think about that) but the music he’s chosen, although it’s various, is consistently obvious – in the conventional, menacing score for the film by Melissa Parmenter, in ‘Fever’ played over the opening titles (designed to lead you to expect something more playfully noir than what you get), in the double helping of irony supplied by more lightweight pop songs of the period and emotionally soaring snatches of opera.  This wasn’t the best week to see a film called The Killer Inside Me (I booked my ticket on Wednesday morning, shortly before the news of the Derrick Bird rampage in Cumbria) but I think I would have found this movie unpleasantly unsatisfying anyway.   Because no film made in Hollywood before the late sixties could have contained much violence, a screen adaptation in the era in which the book first appeared may well have been more interesting than Michael Winterbottom’s.

    4 June 2010

  • The Judge

    Old YorkerFilm review

    David Dobkin (2014)

    The Judge has neither the scope nor the depth to justify its 141-minute running time.  This is a very familiar familial-legal drama – the screenplay by Nick Schenk and Bill Dubuque is original only in the technical sense.  Hotshot Chicago lawyer Hank Palmer (Robert Downey Jr) makes a good living defending clients whom he knows are often guilty.  His professional life is more successful than his personal one:  Hank is going through a divorce with his wife (Sarah Lancaster) and a battle for custody of their only child Lauren (Emma Tremblay).  He returns to Carlinville, Indiana, where he grew up, for his mother’s funeral – having been estranged for years from his father Joseph (Robert Duvall), a long-sitting state court judge.   As usual in this kind of piece, (a) home is the place the protagonist walked away from because (b) family life was full of unhappy memories in the form of (c) a few key traumatic events in childhood and adolescence.  For example, Hank’s elder brother Glen (Vincent D’Onofrio) was a promising baseball player until he was injured when the car the teenage Hank was driving crashed.  (Glen now runs a local motor supplies shop!)  The mental handicap of their younger brother Dale (Jeremy Strong) symbolises the emotionally crippled state of all the men in the Palmer family.   Judge Palmer is arrested in connection with a fatal hit-and-run accident that takes place on the night of the day of his wife’s funeral.  Hank thinks his mother’s death (she and his father were married fifty years) is causing the stern, self-righteous Joseph, a reformed alcoholic, to fall off the wagon.  In fact, the old man’s increasing égarement is an effect of the chemotherapy he’s been keeping quiet about.  Joseph goes on trial and Hank leads his defence.

    It’s not surprising that The Judge quickly fizzled out at the box office.  David Dobkin’s direction is no more imaginative than the story – why bother going to the cinema to see a movie-of-the-week that will soon turn up on TV anyway (even when the cameraman is Janusz Kaminski)?  The courtroom sequences in The Judge are, at least in their early stages, much superior to what British television viewers have been seeing the last few Monday nights, in the disappointing second series of Broadchurch, but things do get melodramatically ropy as the climax approaches.  Just as the prosecuting attorney (Billy Bob Thornton) gives up on trying to draw blood from Joseph and frustratedly confirms ‘No further questions’, the defendant clarifies his previous answer and the whole dynamic of the trial shifts.  The man killed in the hit-and-run, Mark Blackwell (Mark Kiely), had recently been released after serving twenty years for murder – a sentence handed down by Judge Palmer.  It emerges too that Blackwell was free to commit murder thanks to the very light penalty imposed by the Judge for an earlier crime.  Hank asks his father, in the witness box, to explain this uncharacteristic leniency.  The answer – helpful for anyone in the audience who needs reminding that Hank is Joseph’s son as well as his attorney – is that Blackwell’s plight reminded Judge Palmer of Hank as a troubled teenager.

    This is not much of a film but I found it oddly restful to watch.  The characters, although their predicaments are clichéd, are mostly well played.  In the smaller roles, Billy Bob Thornton is acute as the prosecutor and Vera Farmiga, who deserves better roles, emotionally fluid as the old girlfriend Hank left behind in Carlinville.  Ken Howard is good too, as the judge at the judge’s trial.  What praise there’s been for The Judge has centred on Robert Duvall’s performance as Joseph.  An ornery, unsmiling traditionalist – a ‘holier-than-thou prick’, as Hank describes his father – might seem to come too easily to Duvall.  He’s impressive, though, not least because you’re aware that it may not come many more times to an actor now in his eighty-fifth year.  (Perhaps Duvall doesn’t look quite his age but he looks older than the character is meant to be – Judge Palmer is in his early seventies.)   It’s Robert Downey Jr, however, who’s the best reason for seeing The Judge.  Downey doesn’t always connect much with other actors but his sardonic, self-absorbed quality works well here.  He could be expressing unease about giving himself to such obvious material but Downey’s wit and reticence leaven with wryness the predictable ironies of the story.  He suggests a troubled nature – a man who won’t get conflicts out of his system as neatly as the script seems to suggest.   The score isn’t anything special but, being by Thomas Newman, it’s very pleasant.

    24 February 2015

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