REVIEW: Characters Deserve Better in Violent Killer Inside Me

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Eventually, other characters -- among them a local labor leader (Elias Koteas), a crooked contractor (Ned Beatty) and a sharp district attorney (Simon Baker) -- do start to catch on to what "that stuff" might be, though Affleck, in his strained effort to play an everyday sicko who walks among us, tips his hand right at the start. The first time I saw The Killer Inside Me (at the Berlin Film Festival in February), I thought Affleck made a reasonably effective Lou Ford. The second time around I saw a lot less skill in Affleck's brand of deranged normalcy. As Thompson wrote him, Lou is a chilly charmer; his black heart is veiled from the outside world. Affleck -- with his watery, colorless voice and half-asleep eyes -- plays Lou's psychosis as affected blandness, now and then allowing an appraising smirk to cross his tight little lips. If you lived in a small, gossipy town with this guy, you wouldn't trust him for a minute. (The book is called The Killer Inside Me for a reason.)

Affleck's performance is emblematic of everything that, even discounting its extreme violence, makes The Killer Inside Me such a dismal, pedantic piece of work. Technically speaking, The Killer Inside Me is meticulously made. Winterbottom moves the story along, shot by careful shot (the cinematographer is Marcel Zyskind), as if he were turning the pages of a book. That's the problem: Winterbottom is in awe of the material, which isn't the same as being alive to it. He makes playful, jokey use of period songs from the likes of Charlie Feathers and Spade Cooley; the music's jauntiness is probably intended as an ironic contrast to the horrific, soul-rattling aspects of the story, but it's so jarring -- so clever, so canny, so pleased with itself -- that it suggests Winterbottom isn't fully in control of the movie's tone. And even as Winterbottom obediently genuflects before his text, he leaves certain plot details conspicuously murky. (It's never made clear, for instance, why Lou is told one crucial lie, and who decided that lie should be told in the first place.)

The movie was shot in Oklahoma and New Mexico, standing in for Texas, and Zyskind's camera makes adequate use of the dry, unvarnished landscape; unlike Lou, it's forthright -- it can tell no lies. But that doesn't necessarily make The Killer Inside Me an honest or an admirable movie. Winterbottom is marvelously gifted and versatile filmmaker. The sheer range of movies he's made (including Welcome to Sarajevo, 9 Songs and Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, to name three particularly disparate examples) suggests a restless curiosity at work, both visually and in terms of subject matter. That's a wonderful trait in a filmmaker.

Winterbottom's intelligence is certainly at work here, too. He's clearly thought about every choice he's made here, particularly the casting. Affleck's performance is the weakest: He's outshone, in particular, by Alba and Hudson, both of whom find multiple layers of subtlety beneath the pulpy stereotypes of their characters. Hudson puts some sharp edges on her girlish curves -- she plays Amy with just the right mix of shrewdness and desperation, a woman who, in the terms of '50s small-town life, is closing in quickly on her sell-by date. And Winterbottom knows just what he's got in Alba's face, which is as bold and as innocent as a wide-open tiger lily. Alba's Joyce is no fool: When Lou finds a gun on his first visit to her house, she assures him, in a tone of voice so precise in its meaning and intent it could crack a safe, that she's got a permit for it. It's dislike at first sight -- until Lou takes a slap at her face and, shortly thereafter, lashes her bare butt with his belt. That leads to some hot, rough, dirty sex.

The Killer Inside Me isn't a misogynist picture. Winterbottom takes great care to show his own attitude toward the brutal suffering of both of these characters. And it's easy to accept that he's made the violence graphic so we'll grasp the full moral weight of it -- this isn't jazzily cut cartoon brutality presented for kicks.

But that doesn't mean that in addressing that violence, Winterbottom has made the right choices, artistically or emotionally. (Those who are extremely sensitive to spoilers and who haven't already read Thompson's book might want to stop reading here.)

In an online interview with The Wall Street Journal this past April, around the time his film was presented at the Tribeca Film Festival, Winterbottom expressed dismay when the interviewer mentioned that the women in The Killer Inside Me enjoyed having rough sex. "That's interesting, you think that they enjoyed the violence?" Winterbottom said. "The story is being told from [Lou's] point of view so it's his version of what happened. In his head at least, there's no doubt that these women love him." Yet the movie clearly shows us both women enjoying, and sharing in, Lou's sexual proclivities. Are we to believe what a filmmaker tells us with his camera, or how he explains himself in an interview? And if a story is told from one character's point of view, does that mean a filmmaker has abdicated his role in shaping the material? Who's in charge here, the character or the director?

The uncomfortable subtext of Winterbottom's comment is that if those women had enjoyed rough sex -- and everybody knows nice girls don't -- then maybe they were asking for the fate that ultimately befalls them. I'm sure that's not what Winterbottom intended, but again, his defense of his movie is sorely at odds with what's actually in it. And it further calls into question his handling of the movie's two key scenes, both of which show in detail, with only semi-discreet cutting, the movie's female characters being beaten and kicked, and in which the camera lingers on their wounds and their suffering.

I'm not looking for a "tasteful" treatment of violent material -- if I were, I wouldn't feel the admiration I do for Thompson's novel. But I'd argue that extending the violence, as Winterbottom does, is actually anti-Thompson in its lack of economy. Thompson describes Joyce's murder in five brief paragraphs, several of them only one sentence long but each one hitting with the weight of a lead-crystal candlestick. "I backed her against the wall, slugging, and it was like pounding a pumpkin. Hard, then everything giving away at once," Thompson writes in two tersely horrific sentences. Thompson takes 21 words to get to the heart of a vivid, sickening idea. Winterbottom takes a good five minutes, and that's 280 seconds too many.

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Comments

  • Reg says:

    Nice in depth review and commentary. Too bad you didn't like the movie overall. I'm dissapointed to hear Casey didn't come off well, he is usually quite good. I am happy to see Alba get a positive review, she's has an undeserved bad rap, partly because of working with terrible directors, and partly because people can't get past her physical appearance.
    It sounds to me like Winterbottom did the book justice. A short, typical cut-away of the violence that leaves things up to your imagination wouldn't have been honest. Far more palatable and less jarring, for sure, but that's not what this movie is about.

  • NP says:

    There are so many other ways to handle it than "a short, typical cut-away of the violence."

  • Patrick McEvoy-Halston says:

    This may not be a misogynistic; it need not be misogynistic; but it is certainly seeming lately that the way for liberal, self-protecting men to express in-some-way-need-to-be-expressed, apparently near-furious anger at women, is to enact brutal "revenge" with high-purpose cover. Right now it may be the liberal men can get away with saying that "anyone who might find the violence in this movie gratifying or arousing is already virtually beyond the bounds of professional help" (Andrew O'Hehir), but if as I suspect we see more Watchmen/ Girl with the Dragon Tattoo/ Killer Inside of Me follow-up, at some point we've got to suspect that high-concept / purpose has become the last hold-out for expressing deeply felt gripes against terribly wounding female treatment. One suspects it already in how they've ammoed up.

  • SunnydaZe says:

    Seems that the point of the violence is to show that a violent killer not only steals a person's life but also steals their physical identity... There is a similar scene during the beginning of "Pan's Labyrinth".
    We forget just how fragile we are and how evil can take so much with-out remorse.

  • Antarctica Starts Here says:

    I'd really like to read a comparison of this film with American Psycho, given the obvious story similarities and the differences (going by this review) in the way the books' violence was handled.

  • Thanks for the good blog. I look forward to checking back in.