SLING BLADE (76) (second viewing: 79)

Directed by: Billy Bob Thornton

Starring: Billy Bob Thornton, Dwight Yoakam, Lucas Black, John Ritter

The Pitch: After thirty years in a "nervous hospital" for killing his mother and her lover, a mildly retarded misfit returns to the small Southern town of his birth.

Theo Sez: Ah reckon folks seem to like this movie quite a bit - fact o'business, I seen where that Jonathan Rosenbaum calls it "Faulknerian", though ah allus reckoned Mr. Faulkner was torn and tormented and anythin' but folksy, and all 'bout transcendin' his environment 'stead of kinda wallowing in it, the way ol' Billy Bob does here. It's mebbe not too convincin', and some of it - like Doyle's comic-relief buddies, a buncha dumb crackers for us to laugh at - ain't no account at all, but if y'all recollect the first time you saw ERASERHEAD, the way everthing was fuzzy an' all the flat, everyday stuff seemed to take forever an' the shadows were alive with twisted, unspoken things, then you'll know direckly what kind of suggestive originality ah'm talkin' 'bout here. Ah reckon ah like it quite a bit - leastways its patience and its honesty an' the way it takes its time, givin' everthing its due (even if it's just a chair scrapin' on the floor) ; it's better'n a whole sight softer than you're hopin' it'll be, but still so strong and unusual - so damn ornery - it don't hardly matter. An' I'll tell you one thing, that ol' Billy Bob sure can play us poor Southern sumbitches. Mm-hmm. [But seriously folks ... Second viewing, 7-8 years later, and what's instantly striking is how almost all of it is long takes and really wide-angle lenses, often composed with people at the very edge of frame. It's about the place, the Deep South closing in on the characters, and perhaps the space between people rather than the people themselves; when BBT trains his camera on Lucas Black's wondrous wide-open face as he sits in a forest glade - a place of secrets and memories - he's trying to distill the place down to its essence, link to his own memories, encompass everything the South means to him in a single held-long shot of a child's pure gaze. It's like nothing else I've ever seen (and Black, in the forest-glade scenes, is incredible). Bonus points for Yoakam as Doyle, a craven small-time monster like Dwight in THIS BOY'S LIFE, a manageable monster, one they could probably live with (though of course they'd be miserable) if they had to. But why should they have to?]