Frailty
Review
by : Kyle
DuVall
Starring:
Bill
Paxton, Matthew McConaughey
Directed by: Bill Paxton
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The religious psychotic is a boogeyman almost as ubiquitous
in our modern pantheon of monsters as the vampire, the zombie
or the slasher. The devout killer, in figurative terms, is
almost always represented as the symbolic "other" who embodies
the modern, tolerant and rational person's fear of fanaticism
and the power of religion to overwhelm reason, rationality
and responsibility. Pop culture has always been satisfied
to play this paradigm at face value. Religious psychos in
film and literature almost always represent our fears of the
religious, but rarely do they actually touch on our dread
of religion.
And that's
where Bill Paxton's directorial debut Frailty finds its gruesome
twisted soul. Frailty is a ballsy, uncompromising terror film
that takes the cliché of the gibbering, Christian fanatic
and inverts it, twists it and intensifies it into an exploration
of disturbing ideas that have always lurked just under the
skin of the paradigm. Frailty's worldview borders on the profane.
Its inciting, daring and thought provoking, and some will
find it downright blasphemous because Frailty isn't satisfied
with just saying "Christians can be disturbing". It pushes
further to say, at its heart, Christianity can be disturbing,
and its confrontation of certain aspects of faith and family
is risky, unique, and haunting.
The story
begins when a man named Fenton Meiks (Matthew McConaughey)
shows up in the office of FBI agent Wesley Doyle (Powers Boothe).
Doyle has been tracking a Serial killer known as God's Hand.
Meiks tells Doyle he knows the identity of the killer, and
as Meiks tells the agent what he knows, the bizarre and tragic
saga of a childhood turned nightmarishly upside down slowly
unfolds.
Once upon
a time, Fenton tells Doyle, Fenton (now played by Matthew
O'leary) and his brother Adam (Jeremy Sumpter) were just regular
kids. They lived in a quiet, small town with their Dad (Bill
Paxton) and life was pretty good. Dad was a loving, understanding
man trying and seemingly succeeding in raising his kids right
years after the death of their mother. Older brother Fenton
takes care of Adam a lot of the time, but there is no bitterness
in the young man, no resentment of his responsibilities, just
resolve and love. For the kids, life's biggest dilemma seems
to be whether to see MeatBalls or The Warriors at the theater
Friday night. It's a happy childhood, but not an unreasonably
idyllic one. The Meiks life, as told by the adult Fenton seems
real and true.
It makes
it all the more heartbreaking when everything goes horribly
wrong.
One night,
dad rouses the children from sleep with some big news. He's
had a vision, he tells the kids intently but completely rationally.
An angel has visited him in the night and told him that God
has chosen his family to go forth into the world and kill
"demons" disguised in human form. The family has been marked
by God to do his work. God will provide them with 3 special
weapons, he says, and then they will be given a list of names.
Names of demons in human form who must be killed. "this is
our job now…" says Dad, and he seems neither uneasy nor afraid
of what this revelation entails.
Each child
takes it differently. For Adam, there is no questioning this
new revelation. He's too young to really understand what his
father is saying, and too trusting to ever think his father
might be delusional. But Fenton is immediately skeptical.
Still, he loves his dad. Her knows he is a good man. It's
a dream, Fenton decides. It must all be a dream…
But Dad's
new mission is no dream. The next week he comes home with
two of his Holy weapons: a pair of ratty work gloves and an
axe named "Otis". Later, the third sacred weapon is revealed:
A decidedly secular-looking lead pipe. Soon, much to Fenton's
horror, Dad undertakes his grisly work using an enthusiastic
Adam, and the horrified Fenton as accomplices.
The fear
creeps into the film long before Dad carries out the first
killing, so the murders, depicted in a decidedly Hitchcokian,
bloodless way, are backed by the emotional resonance of a
gradually built, inescapable dread. The terrible conflict
in Fenton, who sees his father's as delusional yet still loves
him, is heartbreaking. And young Adam's seemingly wholesale
acceptance of his father's corruption is perverted and terrible.
Fenton carries out his grisly tasks with a mixture of denial
and bravery, but Adam goes about chores like the disposal
of dismembered corpses with the sort of pride and enthusiasm
another boy might feel while helping dad out in the garage.
Blood, gore and splatter-film trickery is completely absent
on screen, and the macabre nature of Fenton and Adam's childhood,
is allowed to tell its gruesome tale naturally, building layer
upon layer of terror and uneasiness.
The plot
is driven forward by Fenton's struggle to convince his brother
of Dad's madness and Dad's attempts to convince his non-believing
eldest son that his mission of murder is just and real. Eventually
they must all come to a breaking point, and what occurs is
linked inextricably to "God's Hand".
Much of
the emotional power of the film's developing madness lies
in Paxton's performance, which sidesteps all of the cliché's
of the fanatical, religious killer archetype. Dad is not a
gibbering, bible thumping maniac. He's a real human being
who loves his children and goes to work and takes his kids
to school everyday even after he has been called upon to do
"God's work". There's none of the sweaty, histrionic sermonizing
that filmmakers and writers usually fall back on to dehumanize
religious psychopaths in fiction. Dad is a man so convinced
his revelation is real, he needs to persuade neither himself
nor others with spittle-flecked fire and brimstone rantings.
Not once does Dad quote the bible. Not once does he use the
word sin. Even when his acts are monstrous, he is never a
monster, never a caricature.
In a perverse
sort of way I couldn't help but think of To Kill A Mockingbird
when watching Paxton's Dad character dealing with his children.
Like Gregory Peck's Atticus Finch, Dad occupies a godlike
place in his children's world. He is wise, kindly and totally
loves his children, and when he tells them something, anything,
they have no reason to believe it is anything but the purest
wisest truth. But, unlike Finch, whose words were of kindness
and tolerance, Dad's truth is seemingly horrifying and psychotic.
This aspect
plays out beautifully in several scenes, and the way the children
react to their father is intimate and convincing. "So we're
like superheroes…" the unquestioning Adam replies when dad
first explains to the kids their new mission of killing demons
in human form. Yes, dad confirms, we're sort of like superheroes…
The moment is so natural and real, for both Paxton's character
and young Adam you have to connect with them. The normal screen
signifiers of madness are not there to comfortably distance
you from Dad. This is how a normal man who sincerely believes
he has talked to the almighty would act, and this is how the
madness would spread into his children. In the childhood narrative,
Frailty's characters, even when apparently pushed beyond the
boundaries of sanity, are always people, not scripture citing
maniacs.
Brent
Hanley's screenplay is also a smart and tense manipulation
of the old horror convention of the unreliable narrator. Frailty
serves up not one, but two unbalanced individuals giving unreliable
accounts of events in the Meiks family saga. The first narrator
is Fenton himself. McConnaghey's delivery, from the first
moment we hear him speak, is cold and detached even when recounting
the most traumatic events imaginable. It's a definite performance
signifier of mental imbalance, but Fenton is introduced as
the closest thing the film has to a hero, which gives some
credibility. Still, we know he is not stable, so everything
he tells us can't really be taken at face value. Likewise,
within Fenton's story, there are the unreliable accounts of
his father and his talk of visions to contend with. Paxton's
Dad character's stories of angelic messages and missions from
god are tainted by his own apparent madness. The framed stories
of these two characters create a sort of mental tug-of-war.
Both seem to be mad some of the time, neither are mad all
of the time. What is real? What are the facts of Fenton's
narrative, and what really happened to Dad?
Unlike
the typical mind-game thriller, the "real" story that exists
outside of Fenton's accounts is stated in no uncertain terms
at the film's conclusion, but its the nature of Frailty's
unreliable narratives allows the film to take of several unbalancing
twists before we get there. Modern horror/thriller directors
are overly-fond of surprise endings and contrived plot inversions,
but Frailty's penchant for turning its own narrative inside
out is neither obligatory nor illogical. Although often it
seems the story has shackled itself to forced shock tactics,
the surprises in the narrative always expand the story's themes
and, in hindsight, the twists all fit together perfectly.
Paxton
as both an actor/director and first-time helmer, makes all
the right choices behind the lens. Frailty is a story best
served by the simple approach. Paxton, who decided to direct
Frailty himself out of fear of what an established Hollywood-backed
director would do to the script, is completely in tune with
this. Paxton doesn't know every scare-inducing gimmick in
the book like a more seasoned horror director, and this is
a good thing, because if he knew them, he'd be tempted to
use them, and what Frailty definitely doesn't need is cheap
slasher- pic jump scares or surreal lighting and set design.
Paxton's workmanlike continuity editing, coupled with a relatively
static camera, lets the situations and characters speak for
themselves. There is so much dread conceptually in the story,
spooky editing tricks and flashy visuals would only distract
the viewer from confronting the conflicting, unsettling emotions
the action on-screen evokes.
The scenes
of Dad revealing his third "Holy Weapon" to his children are
perfect examples. Paxton's camera moves hesitantly as dad
presents his coveted bundle to thekids, and the cuts never
call attention to themselves, never rely manipulation to punctuate
the emotions of the scene. Instead, the film lets the sheer
perversity of the situation creep into the viewer organically.
As Dad
reverently presents the lead pipe, wrapped like an infant
in swaddling clothes, to his children as an instrument of
god, there is a definite urge to laugh. The complete conviction
of Paxton's character is absurd and undoubtedly, humorous,
but it doesn't take long before you realize that your urge
to laugh is just a defense, a mechanism to push the horror
of the situation away. Overly-expressionist cinematography
or manipulative use of editing could push either the absurdity
or horror of the moment too far forward, ruining the sense
of surreal imbalance the scene thrives on. Although he is
riveting as one of the film's stars, Paxton the director is,
ultimately, invisible, much to the films benefit.
Many will
read Frailty as nothing more than an intense portrait of madness,
to many who admire it has already been mistakenly seen as
merely a treatise on the way insanity can be inherited in
a warped family. Others will dismiss it and revile it as a
shallow anti-Christian tract that may seem as hateful and
irrational as Frailty's axe-wielding killer. These misinterpretations
will have more to do with viewers' denial of the chilling,
confrontational final twist the film takes as its ultimate
thesis statement than anything in the substance of the film.
Likewise, Those who simply wish to see Frailty as another
twisting, shock-filled suspense ride will bemoan the lack
of ambiguity the film ends with. But, ironically, it is this
lack of ambiguity and the film's forthright demarcation of
what is real and unreal in its final act, that elevates Frailty
above other mind-game thrillers. Frailty''s literal and figurative
conclusion is transparent and out on the surface to be confronted
by the viewer. There's no uncertainty, no room for an alternate
interpretation to serve as an escape route. Frailty doesn't
flinch, even when the audience wants it to.
There's
an intense hunger for horror films in this country. Films
where monsters human and inhuman alike stalk across the movie
screen to give a few superficial scares, onlt to be contained
and neutralized in the last act are always popular. Ironically,
many people, even horror fans, seem to resent a film that
really seeks to unsettle them and lay bare the real dreads
deep inside. Frailty is the kind of film that dredges up that
kind of real terror . If you can't handle it, stay away, but
if you seek horror films, or any kind of film, that confronts
you and freezes the soul while engaging the mind Frailty is
highly recommended, compelling cinema.
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