There’s a big, big difference between sleazy and sweaty, and just plain nasty. Michael Winterbottom’s film of the novel by the great Jim Thompson – a wonderful hard-boiled writer – never quite gets it right, and by the end gets it horribly wrong.
Thompson’s book is one of his best, set in a small Texas town where the sheriff, Lou Ford, is desperate to escape. When he meets hooker Joyce Lakeland, new in town, they hatch a plan to rip off a rich businessman’s son and escape, but it goes terribly wrong. It’s Thompson’s big theme – all of his characters are low-lifes who feel they must get out of their surroundings but of course they never do – and even if they get some cash, where do they go? There’s always a trail.
Here Lou is played by Casey Affleck and Joyce by Jessica Alba – problem number one. It’s easy to believe Affleck as a good old country boy, happily pottering about his tiny town, much harder to see him as a vicious hoodlum with a penchant for breaking noses. Thompson’s novels are littered with references to Freud, but when Affleck reaches up for a copy next to the bible the effect is just plain silly. Alba certainly has the looks of a femme fatale but, strangely, none of the mystery – she’s sexy, certainly, but somehow not seductive.
The scene where Lou beats Joyce into a pulp and leaves her for dead has been all over the internet and it’s worth dealing with as it’s a prime example of where director Winterbottom gets the tone wholly wrong. It’s supposed to slowly reveal that Lou is a psychotic with a love of beating up women, but could have been dealt with in any number of ways, certainly less heavy-handedly than this. His camera spares us nothing, he smashes her face until it’s unrecognisable, then seems to go back for more. Yes it’s a crucial plot point, yes it shows us his character, but the degree of relish the camera takes in her battering crosses the line from dark and sleazy to cheap exploitation.
The rest of the film consists of Lou trying to pin the crime on anyone but him, but continuing his taste for female punishment with his fiancée Amy Stanton, played by Kate Hudson. She is an actress who seems to suck the life out of any film she appears in, and several scenes with Affleck’s weedy-voiced Lou and her Amy are like watching paint dry.
There are the usual scenes of barren deserts, blue skies, and night-time drinkers in bars, all very Edward Hopper, but it’s up to the old hands to show how to provide real sleaze without even trying. Beatty as a corrupt local bigwig, Koteas as a complete sleazebag and the great Bill Pullman as possibly the maddest lawyer in film history are bang on form, and actually reveal how flat a lot of the preceding minutes have been.
It’s tempting to make all sorts of comparisons here, with Thompson adaptations, desert movies, even Coen brothers films, but No Country For Old Men this isn’t. Instead it’s probably more valuable wondering where it fits in with Winterbottom films – as such, it’s about even with A Mighty Heart or Road To Guantanamo – worthy, visually ok, thematically a little dull.
Overall Verdict: Adaptation of a Jim Thompson novel that is nowhere near sleazy nor downbeat enough, but instead substitutes brutal violence where its heart should be.
Reviewer: Mike Martin
