SLING BLADE
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1997 Scott Renshaw
(Miramax) Starring: Billy Bob Thornton, Dwight Yoakam, Lucas Black, John Ritter, Natalie Canerday. Screenplay: Billy Bob Thornton. Producers: Brandon Rosser, David L. Bushell. Director: Billy Bob Thornton. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, violence) Running Time: 135 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Billy Bob Thornton has presented me with a wonderful dilemma in SLING BLADE: I don't know where to begin praising him. There are writers who get a shot at directing films, and actors who do some writing, and film-makers who take the occasional turn in front of a camera, but in most cases you can tell you are watching a writer direct, or an actor write, or a director act. In SLING BLADE, you never feel as though you are watching a writer try to act, or an actor try to direct. You realize you are watching a natural born story-teller who understands that the words, the performers and the images are not discrete elements, but indivisible parts of a cohesive story.
In SLING BLADE, that story is an enthralling drama centered around Karl Childers (Thornton), a mentally handicapped man who has spent the last 25 of his 37 years in a psychiatric hospital for murdering his mother and her lover after catching them together. Deemed fit to return to society by the state, Karl is released from the hospital and returns to the small Arkansas town where he grew up. There he finds work as a mechanic, and befriends a fatherless boy named Frank Wheatley (Lucas Black). Karl is invited to live with Frank and his mother Linda (Natalie Canerday), but he same welcome is not extended by Linda's abusive boyfriend Doyle (Dwight Yoakam). As Karl tries to adjust to life in the outside world, he finds himself caught in the middle of a growing domestic crisis, and faced with some challenging decisions.
Thornton, who co-wrote the acclaimed ONE FALSE MOVE with Tom Epperson, is a writer who seems to understand every facet of the craft as though he created it. His setting, an insular Southern town, is rendered with a vivid combination of characters and locations; his characters, down to the last minor player, are given personalities uniquely their own. But it is the remarkable dexterity with which Thornton weaves the threads of his story that makes SLING BLADE so powerful. It is the story of a simple-minded man trying to understand Christianity directly from the source, the Bible, after being schooled in a twisted version of the faith by his unstable parents. Even that effort is complicated, however, by an experience of the world which seems to contradict the Bible, particularly when he comes to respect Linda's gay friend Vaughan (John Ritter). Karl's story is heart-breaking because he always is striving to do the right thing, but it is terribly hard for him to get his mind around what that right thing is supposed to be.
It is a marvelous character Thornton has written for himself, and he does an astonishing job of bringing Karl to life. Playing someone with a mental or emotional handicap is one of the most treacherous assignments in acting (right up there with playing an alcoholic), because it is so easy to nail the character's twitches without nailing his soul. The former can be achieved through technical proficiency and a gift for mimicry, with Dustin Hoffman in RAIN MAN and Geoffrey Rush in SHINE as a couple of showy recent examples. Neither of those roles, however, showed us a character trying to grow as a person, and that is what Thornton accomplishes in SLING BLADE. Karl is far from oblivious to the world around him; he is trying to understand morality, atone for his sins and learn from the wrongs that were done to him. While Thornton does turn in an exceptional physical performance, which his polite demeanor and quirky speech patterns, he does not allow Karl to be defined by the way he talks. This isn't a character you feel sorry for, like a pet; this is a man you feel for as a fellow human being.
Thornton the director draws similar superb performances from his entire cast, particularly Dwight Yoakam (yes, _that_ Dwight Yoakam) as the cruel Doyle. He is casually chilling as he mixes insults and threats with chuckles and expressions of endearment as though incapable of telling the difference, and we can see the pathetic man behind the monster. Complexities spill over from SLING BLADE, a film so perfectly crafted and acted from the moment Karl leaves the hospital that I wish Thornton had reconsidered the first fifteen minutes. That opening finds Karl describing his crimes to a reporter in a darkened room, with Thornton re-creating the stage monologue which inspired the film. It is an awkward conceit which gets SLING BLADE off to an uneven start, but it is just as well Thornton demonstrated imperfection as a director. With the kind of flawless work he does as writer and star of SLING BLADE, he might have become positively insufferable if he had directed a perfect film as well.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 razor-sharp blades: 10.
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