Thornton's 'Car' gets flat, tired
Rational reasoning, and, I’m guessing, a good
number of movie studio decision makers would vote to leave this idea of a
family patriarch obsessed with visiting gruesome car crashes on the highway
outside of a small town in Thornton’s head.
Not Billy Bob, though. After all, this is the guy who has portrayed
everything from a fiddle-playing Davy Crockett (The Alamo) to implement-wielding, lovable killer Karl Childers (Sling Blade).
There’s nothing wrong with bringing odd or
even severely flawed characters to the screen.
The problem with Jayne Mansfield’s
Car, co-written by Thornton and former collaborator Tom Epperson (One
False Move), co-starring Thornton and directed by Thornton, is that the
paper-thin plot stalls in neutral much of the time.
Set in small-town Alabama in 1969 while this
country’s hippie movement embraced free love at the same time the USA was
divided over the Vietnam War, Jayne
Mansfield’s Car spins its creative wheels trying to say something important
about families torn apart emotionally yet somehow still bonded together, about
fathers and sons and, oddly enough, about the fatal car crash that cut short
the life of movie star Jayne Mansfield in 1967.
Thornton’s cast list is impressive. Oscar
winner Robert Duvall, who played Thornton’s conflicted father in Sling Blade, is back as Thornton’s
tight-lipped, conflicted dad again here.
Although Thornton, Kevin Bacon and Robert Patrick portray play
middle-aged siblings all going a little middle-age crazy, this family dynamic
is about as far removed from the old TV sitcom “My Three Sons” as one can
imagine.
Bacon takes on the role of Carroll, the aged
hippie of the family, and looks more than a little silly in long hair leading a
lethargic small-town Vietnam War protest parade. Patrick, probably forever typecast as robot T-1000
in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, is Jimbo, tarnished by both
his brothers’ reps as World War II heroes.
Skip (Thornton), a pilot in the
WWII, bears scars – emotional and otherwise – that have left him stuck in child
mode in many ways.
Jayne
Mansfield’s Car suffers no
lack of grist for the dramatic mill. And
that’s where Thornton and Epperson eventually begin to build at least flickers
of decent dramatic fire. Papa Duvall’s
ex, who long ago ran off to England and never returned, has died. Her widower (John Hurt) and family have accompanied
the body back to Alabama for burial.
As Duvall and Hurt, two formidable actors,
spar verbally with very little to say to each other, the other members of this
oddball household engage in various degrees of flirtation and coupling, dope
smoking and generational bonding.
Don’t expect anything as gripping as Sling Blade.
For me, though, Thornton is one of those filmmakers who pushes the envelope
fearlessly. And he has assembled some really good actors
and actresses around him. It’s just that
this project lacks the emotional punch – the Thornton kick in the gut, if you
will – of some of his earlier work.
As offbeat as Jayne Mansfield’s Car is onscreen, it is almost as odd off. Thornton’s semi-failed experiment in
hard-hitting family melodrama just opened in a few movie houses on Sept. 13
(appropriately enough, Friday the 13th).
Odder still, Jayne Mansfield’s Car parallel parked in several cable and
satellite systems’ On Demand queues two weeks prior to the movie-house release.
That’s where you can find it; lurking and bizarrely interesting, like accident victims on the highway just outside the city limits.
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MPAA rating: R (profanity, sexual content, nudity, drug use, bloody images)
Running time: 122 minutes
Jalapeño rating: 2 (out of 4)
