BEFORE: I've come to the end of the McConaughey films, for now anyway - but the plan is for him to come back one more time with "The Dark Tower", which of course I could choose to watch here, except that it's been connected to the films in this October's coming horror chain, providing a crucial link near the start. For a long while "Frailty" was going to connect there, too, if not directly as a horror film then maybe as a lead-in, but once the other McConaughey films were needed elsewhere, it became rather hard to link to, so it had to move with them. It's OK, I've got another lead-in standing by in late September that will allow me to start October more or less as planned before. It's not like I'm waiting on a horror film that may or may not get released in theaters in August. (cough) New Mutants (cough). Anyway, we're going to get there in due time, with or without pandemic restrictions being lifted to allow movie theaters to operate again.
File today's film under the category of "films I've long been curious about" but never quite enough to make a point of watching, but finally I decided to just go for it, and needing another film to fill up the DVD with "The Lincoln Lawyer" on it provided more motivation. I've already explored both kinds of killers before this year, the professional ones ("The Irishman", "Killers") and the freelancers ("The House That Jack Built", "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood", "River's Edge") so maybe it's one of several running themes this year. What's one more film about a killer but a continuation of that theme?
THE PLOT: A mysterious man arrives at the office of an FBI agent and recounts his childhood: how his religious fanatic father received visions telling him to destroy people who were in fact "demons".
AFTER: I'm still at home two full days each week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, while our new bathroom is being built (we may have a result before the end of this week, these guys work VERY fast...) and I'm also getting up early on the other days to let the constructions guys in, around 7:30 am. Three days a week my wife comes home early to supervise the build, and then I go to work in the afternoon. If it weren't for the pandemic, I don't think we would collectively had been able to spend enough time at home to get this remodeling job done, so there's that - we're getting both the time and money to have a new bathroom built thanks to Covid-19, which feels kind of an odd circumstance.
This morning I had some extra time and I needed a way to fill it, so I re-watched "Magnolia", a film that's over three hours long, but it's a good one. There's so much stuff there about coincidence and cause and effect and the stories of about a dozen Californians as they argue, butt heads and reconcile with each other, and I'd forgotten a lot of the intricate details of their stories. Also it name-checks a number of famous urban legends, like the one about the scuba diver who somehow got stuck in a tree during a forest fire, and then of course that ending... But I bring it up here for a couple of reasons - first, that it would have fit right into my chain (if I count movies that I've seen before, which I don't) since it had William H. Macy in it (linking from "The Lincoln Lawyer) and then also shares an actor with "Frailty", though an uncredited one. Things like this make me wonder if there's something magical or mystical about my linking system, because it often seems to come about naturally, too often to just be random coincidence. Then again, I know it's probably just a numbers game, and when films tend to have 100 or even 200 cast members, that works toward making accidental linkings more likely. And the stories in the film "Magnolia" may also tend to provoke debate over whether everything just happens by random chance, or whether there may be an unseen force causing unlikely things to happen.
"Frailty" seems like it should spark a similar debate over the true nature of things. When the father of two boys wakes them up one night to tell them that he's had a vision, and he's going to follow the word of an angel that visited him, who told him that the End Times are nigh, and that he should seek out and destroy demons that are disguised as humans, one has to wonder what's really going on here. The simplest and easiest answer, of course, is that this man has gone crazy somehow, or is broken, or had a really vivid nightmare that he's interpreting as reality. The man seems otherwise normal in his daily life, he goes to work, he eats dinner, and presumably he goes to church - is that where these ideas came from, is he just taking that last book of the Bible a bit too literally?
It's the split-timeline thing here once again, as the framing device shows one adult son talking to the FBI, convinced that the family experiences that he witnessed while growing up turned his brother into the "Hand of God" killer - in other words, he later went into the family business. As we eventually learn from the flashback timeline, Dad's hobby was to produce a list of the names these suspected demons were living under, find some weapons that "God" had left in someone's barn for him to find, then abduct a name from the list and bring them home to his murder-shed. After touching the person, Dad would calim to have a vision of the sins they'd committed, and thus be justified in killing them with an axe, enlisting his sons' help to bury the body in the public Rose Garden.
One son, Adam, believes in the father's mission, but the other son, Fenton, not so much. He makes plans to run away from the family and bring his brother along, but perhaps he should have planned on making that a solo trip. Instead word reaches Dad that Fenton's not a team slayer, and for that he has to dig the new dungeon pit solo, essentially being complicit in his father's crimes, or at least helping to cover them up. This is a neat tie-in with yesterday's film, "The Lincoln Lawyer", where McConaughey's character couldn't turn in his client because doing so would have put his family at risk. Instead Fenton has to appear to play along with his father's visions and deadly hobbies, while looking for another way to put a stop to them.
One might very well ask, why go to the FBI in the first place, just to set the record straight about what happened in the past? It's a valid question. There is an answer, but maybe not the one you'd expect. Then again, there are maybe a few too many reversals here, and near the end it seems like the film doesn't take such a strong stance against a serial killer, coming just a bit too close to justifying his actions. You just can't have a thing like this both ways, although that show "Dexter" might have come close (I've never watched that one.). Other films have played with the idea that maybe it takes a killer to stop a killer, or at least somebody who thinks like a killer. Suggesting that it's OK to kill bad people still represents a slippery slope, though and also it leads to another question, which concerns how the list of victims was generated in the first place. Perhaps this is a rather glaring omission, or someone felt it was better off as a mystery, but I tend to disagree. If this were a math problem, I'd prefer that the student be made to show their work, if you know what I mean.
Also starring Bill Paxton (last seen in "Streets of Fire"), Powers Boothe (last heard in "Superman: Brainiac Attacks"), Matt O'Leary (last seen in "Skyscraper"), Jeremy Sumpter (last seen in "Peter Pan"), Luke Askew (last seen in "The Newton Boys"), Levi Kreis, Derk Cheetwood (last seen in "U-571"), Rebecca Tilney (ditto), Missy Crider, Alan Davidson, Cynthia Ettinger, Vincent Chase, Gwen McGee (last seen in "Life as a House"), Edmond Scott Ratliff, Blake King
RATING: 5 out of 10 security cameras
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