Written and Directed by Billy Bob Thornton Starring: Billy Bob Thornton, Dwight Yokum, JT Walsh, John Ritter, Lucas Black, Natalie Canerday, James Hampton, Robert Duvall.
Sling Blade
Written and Directed by Billy Bob Thornton
Starring: Billy Bob Thornton, Dwight Yokum, JT Walsh, John Ritter, Lucas
Black, Natalie Canerday, James Hampton, Robert Duvall.
Secrets & Lies 
Written and Directed by Mike Leigh Starring:
Timothy Spall, Brenda Blethyn and Marianne Jean-Baptiste
Trap: Well, we’ve managed to scarf down our free food and Cadillac Margaritas, thanks to the Festival’s sponsor Grand Marnier (blatant product plug), so I guess we have to earn it by talking about these two films. Fortunately, both films today were good enough that we didn’t really need to drink the margaritas to kill the aftertaste, but it was nice of them anyway.
Bluesy: Not to mention the neat-o mini crab cakes and that hearts of palm thing. What are hearts of palm anyway? They look like plant life, tastes like compressed air. Considering the settings of Sling Blade being in Arkansas and Secrets & Lies in merry old England, you’d think they’d be dishin’ out fried chicken with slabs of steak and kidney pie, all which were very present in their respected movies. These were definitely two films that you can’t go to hungry.
Trap: To me the key to both films was something the director of the first, Billy Bob Thornton mentioned afterwards, in which he expressed a desire to make “simple stories about complex people”. Both are films in which the characters are of paramount importance, and in which the filmmakers allow their actors the time to gradually reveal them through the careful accumulation of meticulously observed behavior.
Bluesy: Does that mean you liked ‘em?
Trap: Very much so. But let’s take them in turn, since, each deserve special consideration. As far as Sling Blade goes, one of the things I liked about it was the fact that unlike the spate of faux-white trash films we seem currently afflicted with such as Feeling Minnesota or Spitfire Grill, this film genuinely seemed to like and be interested in its characters and their milieu, rather than either condescending to them or using them as either a foil for the filmmaker’s presumed hipness
Bluesy: I agree. It’s not often you see a film about a guy who cuts his mother and her lover to pieces be so sympathetic. The character was something like Forrest Gump with a mission. Thank God there were no flouncing feathers around and just good simple storytelling. Yeah, sure you had some conventional Hollywood stars, like John Ritter, J.T. Walsh and Robert Duvall (not to mention Jim Jarmusch playing the Frostee Cream man). This film was really carried on a cast of unknowns like the great performances of Natalie Canerday, as the beleaguered single mom just trying to hang on, Dwight Yoakam (you heard me right) as her psychotic bully of a boyfriend and Lucas Black (who I loved in American Gothic and was happy to see in something on the big screen), as the kid. Not to mention Billy Bob himself, who I think is one of the most underrated talents in films these days (just his Tom Waits-on-lithium voice alone was worth the price of admission) -- and to think this is the guy who’s always cast as some hillbilly with a gun, pulling off a complex character like Karl Childers. I actually found myself crying over his fate. Okay, so maybe it was just an allergy attack, but it was emotionally induced. I say it’s about time somebody finally gave this guy some money .
Trap: I agree that Thornton was excellent. I’d seen him before in films like One False Move, but this time I didn’t even recognize him at first: the guy’s control of his body language is phenomenal – his face tightened into a permanent smile, that strange, hunched- over posture, always moving in slow, carefully contained movements, the little verbal tics like responding “all right, then” to practically every question. I think the comparison to Forrest Gump is appropriate as far as it goes, but in this case Karl is no holy fool, but someone who in his own way really does gain wisdom over the course of the film. Frank, the boy he befriends is in some ways himself as a child – he’s the same age and in very much the same situation as he was when he committed the murder that got him put away. When he realizes this he also realizes that unless he does something about it, no matter what the cost to himself, Frank may very well be headed for the same fate as he.
Bluesy: Well, before we give away the whole damn movie, let’s move on to the Mike Leigh film, Secrets & Lies. I thought Secrets & Lies was another great independent film, but in a completely different style, not just in subject matter but in the telling. Let’s face it, nobody even comes close to showing the soap opera of everyday people’s lives in such an honest and realistic fashion.
Whereas you have people like Whit Stillman doing long, carefully orchestrated character monologues and such of very rich people with problems like what to wear to the prom er party, I think you can just tell that Mike Leigh gives his characters a theme of something that he feels strongly about, coupled with some amazingly hairy situations, then lets their emotions run amock (not to be confused with people like Henry Jaglom, who just lets his players bludgeon each other to death in reels of self indulgence.) Mike Leigh films always have a story to tell… and this one is a doozy.
A love-starved, lower class, white factory worker finds out the kid she gave up for adoption is not only wanting a relationship with her but is also, to her surprise, black. Match this with the family dynamics of a bunch of guppies caught in the Atlantic, raising issues of adoption, motherhood, class and loneliness… he really packs it all in there and manages to make it not only all plausible but fascinating to watch. As if you become a member of this dysfunctional family just by watching, without any of the nasty after affects like spending years in therapy and studying primal scream theory to “get it.”
Trap: Very true. Much has been made of Leigh’s improvisational “scripting” method – as though he simply turned on the cameras and let his actors rip, which is simply not the case. Certainly a great deal of improvisation goes into building the characters and story, but this is done as a means of uncovering the emotional truths behind the character and their motivations, and once arrived at, these improvisations are incorporated into the work as a whole, further refined over months of rehearsal.
The best way to appreciate the amount of preparation that goes into one of his films can be seen in one scene just before the climax – a backyard barbecue, in which seven characters eat dinner. Everyone seems to be constantly in motion, fussing around, passing plates, juggling food – all the while trading lines with machine-gun precision, yet never sounding anything less than completely natural. Even more miraculous, this entire complex scene is captured in one single, static shot that must last for nearly ten minutes. The sheer control is breathtaking. I asked Leigh about this scene after the film and he said that yes, they had had to shoot the scene a couple of times before they got it right, but these were purely for technical reasons. Few directors would trust their actors to pull something as complex as this off working without a net.
Bluesy: Again, I take it we both liked it. Trap, this is so unlike you to finally see things my way. Tell you what, just for being so “insightful” you can have the next margarita on me.
Trap: I like to think it’s you who’s becoming more insightful, but, hell, as long as the festival’s picking up the tab, have one yourself.
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