7/28/2023 0 Comments Sling blade![]() John Ritter is, of course, as good as always. We see them not as plot mechanisms, but as living, breathing people.Īll of the characters have been cast perfectly. We see characters capable of creating both joy and misery in equal measure. We see Doyle at his worst, and we see him at his best. We live with the characters for a while, as everything unfolds and see everything in its entirety, for better or worse. For such an intense story, it doesn’t play out that way. Thornton also directs the story with a surprising breeziness. What happens isn’t necessarily surprising, he has no intention of subverting expectations, but it does feel organic in how they reach their conclusions. In his screenplay, Billy Bob Thornton sets up the chess pieces and allows the characters to reach the inevitable. Young Frank and his mom Linda are trapped in an abusive household under the psychotic Doyle, and only someone like Karl, who has nothing to lose, can enact the type of violence that could free them from him. Of course, everyone has a choice, but what helps Sling Blade feel as real as it does, is that everyone is in a situation they feel they have no power over. Doyle is the mentally and physically abusive alcoholic who terrorizes them with a constant threat of violence. He meets, and befriends, a young child by the name of Frank, and his mother named Linda. He doesn’t appear to have any desire to commit violence again, so according to the powers that be in American bureaucracy, he’s society’s problem. The only reason he’s being released is because he was never mentally fit enough to be held legally for murder in a prison and because his time has been served. He killed them most brutally and doesn’t appear to have any guilt over it. Years ago, he killed his mother and her lover. The film begins with Karl being released from a mental asylum. Sling Blade does the same thing, with Karl fulfilling his destiny of committing an act of violence, as though the decision is out of his hands. ![]() A weaker movie would have possibly moved into the same direction, with an explosion of violence at the end, but the way it was crafted felt unavoidable. One False Move, which he wrote before Sling Blade, is similar in how it unfolds. He acts as an observer, allowing his characters to work their way out of the corners he’s written them into. The way his movies play out is as though he lets his characters talk, react and lets them decide how to best get this thing from Point A to Point B. I don’t believe he sees himself as the storyteller controlling the lives of his characters. Part of it is because Billy Bob Thornton, as a writer, isn’t concerned with the plot moving forward through acts of god. I’m surprised that it winds up a coherent movie, a good movie at that-and it absolutely baffles the senses that I believe that, against everything, it’s even a great movie. If I sit down and really dissect the plot of it, I’m surprised that it works as well as it does. ![]()
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