It's
difficult to feel sorry for a murderous psychopath, especially when
he beats up on women, but maybe the blame for the shortcomings of
"The Killer Inside Me," belongs to director Michael
Winterbottom, who follows almost every blow with a loving camera,
then lingers on the faces of the victims as death approaches.
Casey
Affleck is excellent as Lou Ford, but it's easier for an actor to
play villainous, and to play pretentious as well. Ford, as a deputy
sheriff in the tiny Texas town where he grew up (his father was the
town's only doctor), has an in-play game on a chess set in his living
room, also plays piano, listens to opera on a 33-r.p.m. hi-fi record
player (remember them?), and muses about life. His thoughts advance
the plot on voice-overs, and look at his boyhood in flashbacks. It
isn't pretty.
James
Thompson's novel, written in 1952, is classic pulp fiction. It was
filmed in 1976 with Stacy Keach as Lou Ford, directed by Burt Kennedy
and written by Edward Mann and Robert Chamblee.
The
current version, set in the '60s with a John Curran screenplay, opens
as the sheriff (Tom Bower) asks the deputy to solve a problem
involving Joyce (Jessica Alba), a prostitute involved with the son of
Chester Conway (Ned Beatty), who town's richest most powerful man.
When the young deputy asks for advice, he's told to handle it the way
he thinks best. At her house outside town, he drops one of the oldest
lines in American films, "I think you should be out of town by
sundown." She responds by cursing at him and punching him. They
fight for a while, but eventually he pins her to the bed, rips off
some of her clothes, takes off his belt, rolls her over and beats her
savagely. When he's finished, she breathlessly takes off his clothes.
The rest of hers fall off magically.
The
two engage in a frantic affair, nicely shown in moments showing him
driving back and forth on the same stretch of highway, intercut with
moments showing them rolling back and forth on the same stretch of
bed.
When
her brutally beaten body is found, the murder investigation begins.
The town's nucleus of good 'ol boys is ready to let things vanish
under the rug, but Conway wants revenge and the district attorney, a
fine underplayed performance by Simon Baker, doesn't believe Ford.
The violence doesn't end with the murder of Alba; Ford also has a
girl-friend, Amy (Kate Hudson) who is willing to put up with Ford and
his escalating violence as long as she thinks he will eventually
marry her.
"The
Killer Inside Me" is a taut, well-constructed movie, but I
cannot honestly recommend as entertainment a film that is so
pathologically violent against women–or against men, either.
"The
Killer Inside Me" opens today
–Joe