BEFORE: May is already half over, even though it feels like it JUST started. And Memorial Day's in just two weeks, so that's sort of like summer, even though there will be three more weeks of spring after that, officially. It's already gone from nice spring weather to what feels like almost too hot, and my wife's sleeping with the A.C. on, so the bedroom's as cold as a meat locker from that, instead of being too cold because the window's open.
Tom Holland carries over from "The Current War: Director's Cut", and this is the third film in a row where he's co-starred with another MCU superhero, I guess there are so many people who've played Marvel characters that this sort of this was somehow inevitable. It's kind of like "Marvel Team-Up", if you remember that comic book where Spider-Man would co-star with a different hero each issue. We had Iron Man, Dr. Strange and now tonight he's with the Winter Soldier.
THE PLOT: Sinister characters converge around a young man devoted to protecting those he loves in a postwar backwoods town teeming with competition and brutality.
AFTER: I don't really "get" this one - it seemed like a pretty big deal when it hit Netflix last September, like I saw a couple of the actors being interviewed on talk shows, but then after a couple weeks, nothing. This didn't make much sense at the time, because we were all still under lockdown then, desperate for anything new streaming to help pass the time. Well, now I think I understand why the buzz dispelled very quickly, and the film went on to get exactly zero award nominations - it's a bummer of a film, for a start. Very dark subject matter, there are no real heroes to root for, everybody's broken or has a dark side or has a killer lurking within them. Even the so-called religious people like the preachers, they're all capable of doing bad things - I mean, we know this, we know there are dark broken people out there, even some who dress like priests and other good people, but every single one of them? That sort of becomes hard to believe, bordering on impossible.
Look, I don't know the book this is based on, or anything about the author, Donald Ray Pollock, who also narrates the film. Maybe this is his oeuvre, his style, the point he's trying to make might be that we're ALL broken people, we're ALL capable of murder or rape or other bad things, if we're pushed too far or we see some big injustice in the world. But are we? And even if we are, do I need that point driven home, over and over? But even worse than the depictions of all these bad things is that it's all sort of a surface discussion of sins and bad events, we never learn WHY any of these bad people are doing these bad things, and thus we never really come to understand them, we have to just shrug our shoulders and think, "Ah, well, that's just what some people are capable of..." but then I'm left feeling empty inside and wondering why there's such evil in the wooded areas of rural Eastern America.
(SPOILER ALERT regarding plot details here, it's impossible to discuss this film without revealing a few things. If you want to watch the film cold, please STOP HERE, turn around, and come back after viewing.)
Central to the story is the Russell family, Willard Russell served in World War II and saw horrible things, as one might imagine. The worst is a U.S. soldier who was crucified and skinned, and again, we're not quite sure WHY this happened. Russell returns to the U.S. and tries to lead a good life, he marries Charlotte, a waitress from a diner in Meade, Ohio and they move to Knockemstiff, where they raise a son, Arvin.
There are a few "Pulp Fiction"-like asides to the story, we follow up with Arvin later, but it's worth noting that Willard's mother wanted him to marry Helen, but he only had eyes for that waitress. Helen's thread leads her to fall for Roy, a visiting preacher who dumps spiders on himself, sure that the lord will protect him. Helen marries the preacher and they have a daughter, Lenora, but it's not long before Roy takes her out into the woods and she's never seen again - he apparently killed her just to try to resurrect her? Yeah, Roy may not be all right in the head...
Roy's future thread, however, links him up with Carl and Sandy, a couple who enjoys going on road trips, picking up hitchhikers, getting those hitchhikers to have sex with Sandy, and then killing them. They take photos of the sex and of the killing, and it's a bit tough to say which they enjoy more, that's the kind of thing we're dealing with here. Again, no heroes, just more bad people doing bad things, occasionally to other bad people.
When the story picks up Arvin's thread again, his mother dies from cancer and Willard's father tried to pray the cancer away, he even killed Arvin's dog because he somehow thought God would take the dog's life as a sacrifice and save Charlotte, only it doesn't work that way, and I don't know anybody who thinks that it would. If your name's not Abraham and you don't hear God telling you to make a sacrifice to him, then I wouldn't go around killing things to make other things happen the way you want them to. Just sayin'.
Arvin's sent to live with Willard's mother, I think, who's also taking care of Lenora, the daughter of Helen and Roy. So Arvin and Lenora are cousins, I think - only they think of themselves as brother and sister. Arvin protects Lenora from three high-school bullies, using techniques taught to him by his violent (yet also God-fearing) father. But he doesn't see the real threat, which is the substitute preacher who comes to town, to replace the regular one who's sick or something and has to go away for a while. I think. Reverend Teagarden takes advantage of Lenora, and things sort of go further downhill from there.
Meanwhile, there's a sheriff who's the brother of Sandy, of Carl & Sandy fame, and he wants to know what his sister's up to, but he's also on the take, and in the pocket of a local mobster, I think, but his job, his dirty dealing and his concern for his sister are all starting to come into conflict with each other. I think. So he takes action, and by this I mean he starts killing people, which seems to be the only solution that any of these characters seem capable of, or is that the novel writer's only go-to answer for everything? So essentially there's this big chart of bad characters, imagine if you will a big bracket like the NCAA basketball tournament, and 16 gets down to 8 and 8 then becomes 4, and finally there's just two bad hombres left in the finals, and so they have to try to kill each other. After a while the killing is so widespread and commonplace that it practically becomes banal, and killing somebody for their bad behavior is the only WHY that we're bound to get out of this movie, so I guess we'll just have to be satisfied with that.
There's no satisfying payoff, though, just a whittling down of characters until there's just one left, and then that character has to leave town and probably hide out for the rest of his life, or else he'll have to explain the big pile of bodies that he left behind. Look, I know there are a lot of people in the world who have disappeared over the years, that's why they used to put people's pictures on milk cartons and such, but they can't all just be rotting bodies out in the woods in Ohio and West Virginia, can they?
Plus, I'd like to think there's some balance in the world - that for every serial murderer, there are at least five people who DON'T ritually kill people, and for every serial rapist I hope there are ten or more people who DON'T molest young, impressionable girls, and so on, but you wouldn't know that if you just stick to the plot points here. This is not the right time for this, we need more positive movies about people donating money to charities and working at food banks and rescuing puppies, you feel me? Look, I already wasn't planning on ever going back to Ohio, or ever visiting West Virginia, frankly this all just seals that deal for me.
Also starring Bill Skarsgard (last seen in "It Chapter Two"), Robert Pattinson (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Sebastian Stan (last seen in "I'm Not Here"), Riley Keough (last seen in "American Honey"), Jason Clarke (last seen in "Serenity" (2019)), Eliza Scanlen (last seen in "Little Women"), Haley Bennett (last seen in "The Girl on the Train"), Mia Wasikowska (last seen in "Only Lovers Left Alive"), Harry Melling (also carring over from "The Current War: Director's Cut"), Kristin Griffith (last seen in "Interiors"), David Atkinson, Pokey LaFarge, Douglas Hodge (last seen in "Tulip Fever"), Drew Starkey (last seen in "Love, Simon"), Teddy Cole, Gregory Kelly, David Maldonado (last seen in "I Saw the Light"), Mark Jeffrey Miller (last seen in "October Sky"), Michael Harding (last seen in "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy"), Lucy Faust, Abby Glover, Zack Shires, Ivan Hoey Jr., Given Sharp (last seen in "Paper Heart"), Cory Scott Allen (last seen in "Den of Thieves"), Emma Coulter, Jason Collett, Eric Mendenhall (last seen in "Richard Jewell"), Michael Banks Repeta, Ever Eloise Landrum, and the voice of Donald Ray Pollock.
RATING: 4 out of 10 chicken livers
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