The brash violence of Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me -- adapted from Jim Thompson's merciless and enthralling 1952 pulp novel about a psychotic West Texas sheriff -- began dividing audiences last January at Sundance. It also appears to have divided Winterbottom himself, though he doesn't know it. The controversy involves two particularly violent scenes, one a protracted sequence in which a character played by Jessica Alba is beaten until her face resembles what one character calls "stewed meat, hamburger." The nutso sheriff, played by Casey Affleck, throws perhaps some 20 punches; we see about six or seven of them land, as Alba's face becomes progressively bruised, bloodied and misshapen, until it resembles a cracked-open, oversized plum.
Winterbottom, when asked about his approach to the story's violence, has defended his choices with what amounts to an "It's all in the book" wave of the hand. "For me that was the point of the violence in the film in a way -- it is something very repulsive," he told The Hollywood Reporter. "In terms of how we depicted it, we were just trying to make it as close to the book as possible. The book is very shocking."
Winterbottom's right about one thing: A movie version of The Killer Inside Me has to be violent. Thompson's novel is elegant in its bluntness and cruelty, as efficient as a closed fist -- you can turn away from it, but you can't escape it. But there's no subtle way to put this: Winterbottom's version goes too far.
He is faithful to the book, to the point of fetishization: Winterbottom is the adapter as stenographer, a dogged chronicler of every comma and em-dash. It's Thompson's novel, but it's Winterbottom's movie, and the director hasn't taken firm control of the violence it. The camera has no conscience; it doesn't know by itself when to stop looking. And sometimes a filmmaker owes it to his characters to look away.
In The Killer Inside Me, set in '50s Texas, Affleck plays deputy sheriff Lou Ford, a supposedly plain-vanilla lawman with a taste for homespun clichés, sick sex and killing, although the denizens of the tiny town where he lives seem to be most directly affected only by the first: Their eyes glaze over as he fills their airspace with bland aphorisms like "Haste makes waste," delivered in a blurry drawl. But Ford is a wily son-of-a-gun. Boring the bejesus out of everyone around him is part of his subterfuge. (The story, as Thompson wrote it and as screenwriter John Curran has adapted it here, is told from Ford's point of view.) There's a seedy secret in Ford's past, as well as a deceased half-brother who took the rap for it. There are also a few secrets in his present: Early in the movie he meets, and falls for, Joyce Lakeland (Alba), a prostitute who's recently set up shop on the outskirts of town; he repeatedly sneaks out to see her for kinky assignations, and she falls in love with him. He also has a steady girl, Amy Stanton (Kate Hudson), a respectable type who nonetheless likes to wait for Lou at his home, clad only in her scanties.
Everyone around Ford takes him at face value, willfully oblivious to the stench of his interior rot. Only a bum who's apparently drifted into town -- played, in a small but perfectly shaped role by Brent Briscoe -- cottons to what's going on behind Ford's blanker-than-blank eyes. When the deputy stubs his lit cigar out in the bum's outstretched hand, the guy cries out in pain before stalking off with a warning: "You better watch that stuff, bud."
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.