In a perfect world, all critics would approach every piece
of art with an open mind, judging it only against itself in terms of success or
failure. But since critics are human beings, and our knowledge is based on past
experiences, that approach will never happen, so we have to rely on
intellectual filters to avoid bias. If, as a critic, one can attain
self-awareness and avoid self-righteousness, then your reviews will reflect
fact and opinion honestly.
Obviously, this isn’t just the failing of critics. Everyone
dislikes at least one movie for not being what they expected. I’m just as
guilty as anyone. I did not review Cronenberg’s History of Violence when
it was released, not because it departed so radically from the graphic novel it
adapted, but because it went in a third direction I didn’t anticipate. I wasn’t
expecting David Cronenberg, of all artists, to take the storyline into familiar
action movie territory. Because the movie didn’t live up to my ill-conceived
expectations, I felt resentful towards it for some time. (Maybe I should be
proud of myself for not expressing those feelings in print, instead of the
more-reasonable reaction of being disgusted with myself for setting my own
trap.)
Fortunately, I knew going into it that I was going to be
biased, both pro and con, towards Killer Joe. First, I was already
pre-disposed to liking it because of director William Friedkin’s first
adaptation of a grim Tracy Letts’ play, Bug. Bug was my intro to Letts’
surreal Southern Gothic gallows humor and Killer Joe is the only of his
plays I’ve seen performed live. It’s a violent, crass and grotesquely funny
slice-of-horror involving a white trash family and a hired killer. People are
violently assaulted and bloodily murdered on stage throughout the course of the
film (effects in this case courtesy of A Far Cry From Home’s Benzy).
There’s also a better-than-fair amount of nudity in the play, made much more
graphic by my position in the front row, about a foot or so from the stage.
Plus, these were local actors who I knew for the most part and, considering the
play opens with the lead actress bare from the waist-down, again, a little over
a foot from my face, it’s hard not to get involved. The second act opens with
the titular character, a corrupt Dallas police detective, completely nude, feet
from my face, and during which time seemed to slow down to eternity (again,
small theater).
[From the Pittsburgh City Paper:
in background, from left) John Gresh,
Lissa Brennan, John Steffanauer
and Hayley Nielsen, and (foreground)
Patrick Jordan in
barebones productions' Killer Joe. Photo by Ilya Goldin.]
I was blown away by Letts’ script, shocked by the violence
(I dodged a flying chicken leg during the climax), and astounded by several of
the performances. In particular, I was struck by Haley Nielsen, who played the
family’s possibly brain damaged pseudo-Lolita, Dottie. Dottie sleepwalks and
sleeptalks, says odd things at inopportune times and appears almost psychic at
others. She’s damaged and fragile and is the audience’s anchor to the
story—even if you couldn’t care about the other characters, doomed and damned
by their own bad decisions, you want to see that Dottie is safe in the end.
Nielsen, a local actress I wasn’t familiar and thus wasn’t saddled with any of
my personal baggage, performed Dottie with a far-away, almost ethereal quality,
fully aware of what was happening, yet at the same time far-removed and
emotionally stunted. Dottie is the key character in Killer Joe, all of
the action revolves around her to some degree, and I think any performance of
the play would hinge on the actress playing her. So, as a fan of the play, I was simulataneously excited and
trepidatious about a film adaptation. Given Friedkin as a director, I figured
the story was in good hands, particularly with Letts adapting his own script
for screen. Because Billy F. never struck me as a guy who particularly gave a
shit about mainstream success, I figured all the violence and sex would remain
intact. My biggest fear, though, was not who would play Joe but Dottie.
Friedkin could stick Adam Sandler in the title role and still pull off a good
movie. But Dottie… no Hollywood actress even came to mind.
[Image found at http://www.spectacularoptical.ca]
Just like the play, Killer Joe begins with Chris (Emile
Hirsch) banging on his father’s trailer door, begging to be let in. He is
answered by his stepmother, Sharla (Gina Gershon)—she’s naked from the
waist-down and her crotch is in his direct line-of-sight. This is how both
Letts and Friedkin establish the sophistication of the crowd. “You answer the
door like that?” Chris demands.
To which Sharla replies, “Shut up—I didn’t know it was
you!”
“Class” is not an issue with these people. So it comes as
no surprise that Chris is in debt to drug dealers and wants to hire someone to
kill his birth mother for $50K worth of insurance money. It’s less of a
surprise when his wet-brain father, Ansel (Thomas Hayden Church), less than a
generation older than his son, puts up little argument against the plan.
Somebody told Chris “about a guy” who does murder-for-hire, Dallas cop Joe
Campbell (Matthew McConaughey), aka “Killer Joe”, and Chris figures that the
guy might be charitable enough to do the job on spec and take a cut of the
insurance money after. But Joe isn’t the kind of guy to give away murder
services and demands twenty-five grand up front, non-negotiable. The story
might have ended there, with the Smith family returning to their no-class
hovel, if it weren’t for Dottie (Juno Temple). As a baby, Dottie’s mother tried
to suffocate her with a pillow because “she was young and didn’t want to give
up her life.” It didn’t work, obviously—Dottie just “wasn’t” for a short
while—and returned to the land of the living as a constant disappointment. When
Joe asks Dottie how she knows this happened, being an infant and all, Dottie
replies, “I remember it.”
Dottie is part of the family without serving any specific
function. Ansel treats her like a little girl; to Chris, she’s the only shred
of anything good; to Sharla, she’s just around, to make dinner or run errands.
Emotionally, Dottie is twelve and no one does anything to help her mature. The
only giveaway that she’s older is her body and her unconsciously-hyper
sexuality, which disturbs Chris’ dreams and enchants Joe. Joe agrees to do the
job as long as Dottie is his “retainer”.
Joe and Dottie’s “first date” starts off uncomfortable
enough. She rebels at wearing a cocktail dress and is sobbing when Joe arrives.
He speaks kindly to her, but matter-of-factly, without condescension, without
walking on egg shells around her. Midway through their meal, he puts an end to
her incessant absent-minded and skittish babbling by having her stand up,
remove her clothes and put on the dress for him. As in the play, this is an
electrically creepy moment but for completely different reasons. On stage,
Nielsen stripped in front of Joe and, thus, in front of the entire audience,
rendering herself completely vulnerable and not just to him, but to the
audience. It’s meant to draw forth instinctual protectiveness from everyone
watching, accentuating that Joe is a predator. But in the film, Friedkin stages
the action in a single shot where Joe stands with his back to Dottie as she
changes. The camera doesn’t focus on her nudity but it doesn’t shy from it
either. What we focus on, then, is a similar transition in Joe’s character, but
one with far more menace. Never once does he face her, and barely looks at her
even when he moves her in front of him, and instead keeps his eyes on some
faraway spot on the ceiling. “How old are you right now?” he asks.
“Twelve.”
“So am I.”
By now if you’re expecting any kind of happy ending, I wish
I could live a day inside your mind.
The underlying violence begins to ripple forth at this
point, as Joe installs himself in the family’s trailer and their life. Chris’s
sense of morality keeps butting up with his instinct for survival and he
continually flip-flops over the plan—kill her, Joe; don’t kill her, Joe—and
then he focusses purely on rescuing Dottie, who at this point may not even need
to be rescued. But since Chris hasn’t made a single winning move since the film
started, the outcome, to quote the Magic 8 Ball, “is doubtful”.
Friedkin plays Letts for all its worth, squeezing every
drop of amorality and depravity onto the screen. Even if you know all the beats
of the story, the violent beats are still shocks of cold water. And everyone in
the film holds their own. Matthew McConaughy is a stand-out as the cold-blooded
Joe, who is sweapt out to sea by the dotty Dottie. There is a moment, after
Sharla has been beaten and humiliated, where the camera stays in tight close-up
on Gina Gershon’s face and you know she’s never been better. Emile Hirsch as
Chris and Thomas Hayden Church as Ansel keep our sympathies in the air like a
heated game of volleyball. None of the Smiths are remotely bright; their
desperation drives their mundane existences and there’s no real loyalty lost
between them. It’s almost too easy for a reptile like Joe to slide in and
dominate them all, especially when they think they can use chest-beating to
gain the upper hand.
So it all comes down to Juno Temple as Dottie. Not an
illogical choice, given her impressive performance in Atonement. (Hey,
it got her into four collective minutes of The Dark Knight Rises.) In Killer
Joe, she is uninhibited and unashamed, her vulnerability is communicated by
her big doe eyes and post-pubescent movements. And it’s here that my objective
dissonance took hold. It’s entirely unfair to compare Temple’s performance to
an actress in a regional production of the play, but Hayley Nielsen was my
introduction to the story and her performance defined the character to me. As
Dottie, Nielsen was ephemeral and on another plane of existence than the rest
of the characters. Most of her lines were delivered in a breathless and excited
monotone, every line a declaration and, thus, a non-sequiter. For me—and only
for me, obviously—Temple was too grounded in her portrayal of Dottie. Within
tight close-ups her Dottie was never farther from me than Nielsen,
spacially-speaking, and her fragile, damaged persona is in perfect service of
the story and script. But she had a physical presence that Nielsen
intentionally abandoned, and it drags the rest of the story, and all of its
horror and grit and despair, down into the gutter where it began. Temple Dottie
struck me as too real. The rest of the family you could meet at any Wal-Mart in
the country. A physical realization of Dottie, even though she is a “pure”
character, brings these low-lifes into too-sharp of a relief.
But a real Dottie allows for a more
believable Killer Joe. I have no real proof in my suspicion, but I think it
would be an easy temptation for actors to play Joe as a bad-ass, smooth and
over-the-top thug who is only in control because he’s slightly smarter than
those around him. Everyone in the story is in danger of characature, just a few
millimeters off in either direction will result in something balloony and lumpy
from a Ralph Bakshi movie. But McConnaughy plays Joe as a well-oiled
psychopathic watch, a mass of coiled springs contained by the exterior. His
interaction with Dottie brings out a different man, a man used to control but
unused to an unpredictable factor like Dottie. Though he does manage to possess
her, there’s something of her at work on him beyond her childish sexuality. She
mentions “pure love” several times throughout the film, and what Joe feels for
her is obviously far from pure, but maybe to his mind it is. His interest in
her may be a result of something human unlocked inside of him. As with Dottie’s
nudity, Joe’s interaction with her allows for something vulnerable to shine
out. It isn’t redemption, but it isn’t the revulsion you’re meant to feel
during a live performance.
It could be quibbling, but this leads to one point of
genuine disappointment in the film. In the play, Joe’s dominance and subjugation
of the family is presented at the beginning of the second act. Having been
brutally beaten by the drug dealers, Chris collapses through the trailer’s
front door. Instead of Sharla, he encounters a completely naked and
gun-weilding Joe. Thinking Chris might be a burglar, Joe has lept out Dottie’s
bed and onto Chris as the complete alpha male. On stage, it’s shocking,
naturally, and awkwardly funny and uncomfortable, but it establishes Joe’s new
position in the dynamic. Like Beowulf, he’ll face his greatest challenges with
only a weapon and the skin he was born in.
In the film, Friedkin declines to show McConaughey in his
full-frontal glory. It’s obvious that he’s completely nude, but the reveal
isn’t as strong. We stay on a neutral point of view as Chris crashes through
the door and Joe is already waiting for him on the other side. Visually, it
removes a great deal of dynamism from both the scene and Joe’s character. In
the film, instead of a Grecian athlete or an unbridled predator, he’s simply a
naked guy with a gun. An argument can be made for many things—that it cheapens
Temple’s and Gershon’s nudity, that it was staged thusly to avoid further
problems with censors (even though Friedkin allowed the film to go to theaters
unrated, which waters down this latter argument). All it does is diminishes the
ferocity of the scene. I’ve thought it over and come to the conclusion that
this is a thematic mistake. My issues with Juno Temple’s performance are my own
hang-up.
With all the other fearless choices made with the material
it’s disappointing that Friedkin and/or McConaughey--to quote an actor I’ve
worked with who is accustomed to nude scenes--“pussied out on the dick shot”.
Ultimately, a play isn’t a movie and a movie isn’t a play
and critics should remember that before they waste time writing a review.
Report on the art you saw, not the art you expected. And definitely don’t watch
Killer Joe without a designated moral compass.
[Special blame goes to Eric Thornett (writer/director of A Sweet and Vicious Beauty) for originally dragging us to the play in 2009.
(aka Donald Westlake), 
)—and influenced a goodly number of others. But it seems nearly impossible to capture the sheer underworld amorality for the screen and have audiences react favorably. Moviegoers like a hero. Even if he does scuzzy things, shoots people, beats up women, he still has to have some level of likability. On the page, Parker isn’t likable, nor does he want to be. Nor does he care if you hate him, are indifferent to him, or barely notice he’s there—so long as you’re not in his way. 
