Billy Bob Thornton (1996)

At the age of twelve, Karl Childers, an Arkansan boy with learning disabilities, killed two people and spent the next twenty-five years in a state mental hospital.  At the start of Sling Blade, he is about to be released; within a few months of his release, Karl has killed again and, in terms of physical location, he ends the film where he began it.  The pre-adolescent Karl’s victims were his mother and her lover.  (At first, Karl thought the man was attacking his mother – then he realised she was enjoying herself.)  A quarter-century later, Karl slays the viciously abusive boyfriend of Linda Wheatley, a thirty-something widow, with whose young son, Frank, Karl becomes fast friends.  (Money troubles drove the woman’s husband to suicide and Karl becomes a new father figure to the boy, who is now the same age that Karl was when he killed his mother.)  As Karl is about to leave his care, the head of the hospital explains that medical evaluations have repeatedly failed to detect any sign of persistent homicidal tendencies in him; when asked if he thinks he might kill again, Karl’s reply is ‘I don’t reckon I got no reason to kill nobody’.  He also reckons, however, that, faced with what was going on between his mother and her lover on the kitchen floor, he ‘done the right thing’; and whereas that killing was unpremeditated, Karl feels a moral obligation to get rid of Doyle Hargreaves, the alcoholic tyrant who’s making the lives of Linda and Frank a gruesome misery.  During his time in the hospital, Karl has learned to read and write and become a diligent Bible reader (‘I don’t understand all of it, but I reckon I understand a good deal of it’).  He is baptised just a few hours before he kills Doyle but the sixth commandment doesn’t prevent Karl doing what he’s sure he must do.  In his last conversation with Frank before Doyle’s death, Karl tells the boy, ‘You will be happy’, and there’s no doubt that Frank’s life will be happier with Doyle out of it.  Karl Childers is not just the protagonist of Sling Blade:  he’s its hero, and this makes the movie morally challenging.

I was impressed by Sling Blade, and by Billy Bob Thornton as Karl especially, when I first saw it.  Fifteen years or so on, Thornton’s performance remains impressive but it’s admirable rather than overpowering second time around, and I now noticed other things, and bigger weaknesses, in the film, which Thornton expanded from a twenty-five-minute short, Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade, that he wrote and starred in, and that George Hickenlooper directed, in 1994.  Shortly before he leaves the hospital, Karl is interviewed by a college student, who has read of his impending release and wants to write a piece about him.  Karl refuses to be asked questions so the interview takes the form of a barely interrupted monologue, in which he tells the girl about his upbringing and the circumstances in which he became a killer.  George Hickenlooper’s film is built around this monologue and ends once it’s over.  (The interviewer in the short is a young professional journalist, rather than a college student, and is played by Molly Ringwald.)  The monologue is a highlight of the feature too but the lead-up to it, in both films, hints at Thornton’s somewhat Manichaean approach to the material.  It’s an approach which may help to confirm the story’s Southern Gothic credentials (I saw Sling Blade again last month as part of BFI’s Southern Gothic season) but which detracts from the piece as a credible drama and, not unexpectedly, becomes a larger liability in the longer film.  (All the following references in this note are to the feature rather than the short.)

Before the interview, Karl sits quietly in a room in the hospital and is joined by another patient, called Charles Bushman.  (This may be his real surname; it may be a nickname appropriate to the anecdote he tells Karl.)  Charles pulls a chair over and settles himself on it, very close to Karl.  The noise of the chair being dragged across the floor is a good detail.  The sound goes through you; you also get an immediate sense that it’s a sound Karl has heard many times before, signalling the approach of the pestering Charles.  J T Walsh, though, overdoes Charles’s clammy, nudge-wink lasciviousness, his filthy laugh.  The effect is not only to make the chaste, God-fearing Karl grunt and squirm with discomfort but also to exclude sympathy on the viewer’s part for a man who, like Karl, must have been diagnosed as mentally ill.  When Karl eventually returns to the institution, he, of course, has to suffer Charles again.  This time Karl speaks up and says he’s not going to listen anymore.  The moment is presented not only as a kind of breakthrough for Karl but also as a comeuppance for Charles.

Karl, who has become deeply institutionalised, is treated decently by various people in the outside world – by the hospital head (excellent James Hampton), at whose home Karl stays on his first night out of care, by the boss (Rick Dial) of a small-engine repair shop, who gives Karl – a dab hand at mechanical work since he was a boy – a job and a temporary roof over his head in the workshop behind the premises.  An employee of a fast-food outlet called Frostee Cream introduces Karl to the French fries to which he becomes so attached.  (The employee is Jim Jarmusch:  it’s a very nice cameo, centred on the Frostee Cream man’s struggle to keep his hat from slipping and a menu from colliding with it.)   Then Linda (Natalie Canerday) lets Karl move into the family garage and, even when she learns of his past, has no qualms about his spending time with her son.   As Frank, Lucas Black is stronger in his physical acting than in his line readings (his facial expressions are often good); John Ritter, although he’s OK as Linda’s awkward gay friend and the manager of the supermarket where she works, is playing a character who seems a bit dated now.  All in all, though, the sympathetic people are not only sympathetically played – they’re in a majority among those whom Karl encounters after his release.

The minority, as J T Walsh’s playing of Charles Bushman has foretold, are excessively unsympathetic.  There’s one exception to this:  Robert Duvall, by far the biggest name in the cast, who has a single scene as Karl’s father.  Duvall makes this man – who treated his learning-disabled son appallingly in the boy’s first years and who now lives in squalid isolation, still in the family home – repellent and pitiable.  (It seems that Robert Duvall was a kind of mentor to Thornton, who has said that Karl Childers was inspired partly by the character of Boo Radley, played by Duvall in his screen debut in To Kill a Mockingbird.)   Doyle Hargreaves is a major weakness, however – narrowly written and played by Dwight Yoakam as very intentionally nasty.  There’s not a hint of any kind of charm or insouciance, which might have given a clue as to what Linda Wheatley saw in Doyle in the first place.

The role of Linda is underwritten.  There’s a suggestion at first that a soft heart and gullible nature get her into problematic relationships but, as played by Natalie Canerday, Linda’s not a fool.  If she was still attracted to Doyle and, against her better judgment, couldn’t resist sticking with him, there’d be at least some tension in the family set-up – but there’s no evidence of this:  she appears to want rid of him as much as Frank does.  (Since her husband took his own life because he couldn’t afford to look after his family, it might have helped if Thornton had suggested more strongly that Doyle could offer Linda and Frank relative financial security – which would understandably be important to Linda.)  The longer Sling Blade goes on (and it goes on too long: 134 minutes), the clearer it becomes that the reason Linda and Thornton can’t get rid of Doyle is that he has to stay around for the sake of a tragic climax and dramatic symmetry, in other words so that Karl can kill him.

Billy Bob Thornton had a big critical and commercial success with Sling Blade (and won an Oscar for his screenplay) but it takes a lot to direct a first feature in which you’re playing the lead, especially if you’ve hardly ever had a starring role before in a full-length picture.   Although the film  is consistently absorbing, this is thanks much more to Thornton’s performance than to his direction.   He makes Karl intensely likeable and often funny; the various mannerisms of the characterisation – the clasping and rubbing together of his hands, the nervous, guttural sound often appended to Karl’s words – are fully absorbed.  Thornton the director’s touch is less certain.  Shots often seem to be held for much longer than they deserve to be (one of Linda, Frank and Doyle eating dinner comes to mind particularly).   A sequence involving Doyle and the other members of the rock band he plays with some evenings – which is meant to be tense until it erupts into violence – is remarkably lacking in overlapping dialogue.  The use of accompanying music (the score is by Daniel Lanois) is incontinent.  Thornton the writer, although he created some thin characters in expanding his original script, comes up with plenty of good dialogue – and some memorable turns of phrase for Karl Childers.  The film is named for the implement with which Karl killed his mother and her lover:  ‘Some folks call it a sling blade, I call it a Kaiser blade’.

31 May 2015