Frailty
Comes for Your Soul Frailty
Comes for Your SoulFor most of you reading this, if your dad came running breathlessly into your room in the middle of the night, blathering on about how an angel of the Lord just appeared to him and told him to find three magical weapons that he and the rest of your family will use to "destroy the demons around us," chances are your response would be: "Get the Hell out of my room, old man ... and stop drinking Royal Crown after midnight."
But enough about my childhood.
This is the premise of the new thriller, Frailty. Bill Paxton plays such a dad, a widower and father of two who is a decent, hard-working man in small-town Texas. The vision that he has, though, is so convincing that he immediately recruits his teenage son, Fenton Meiks, and his younger son, Adam, to take a pair of work gloves, a metal pipe, and an ax named Otis (I know, it sounds like a Hoyt Axton song) and seek out evil. Fenton, the older and wiser of the two children, thinks that the Texas heat has finally gotten to daddy. How can the killing of innocent people be justified, he openly questions. But his father and brother disagree. They aren't killing people, they argue. They are "destroying demons."
The film is told largely in flashback in the present day by a grown-up Fenton (Matthew McConaughey) to FBI agent Wesley Doyle (Powers Boothe). Doyle has been hunting a serial murderer known as the God's Hands killer. Fenton tells him that the killer is indeed his younger brother, Adam, who grew up believing their crazy father. The film opens soon after Adam has been found dead, and Fenton has stolen an ambulance to drive to Dallas and spill the beans about his messed-up family to Doyle.
So, do you think I have just given way the whole movie? Think again. Frailty is a movie that will mess with your mind if you let it. I let it. I'm still thinking about this disturbing, little thriller more than a day after seeing it. That's the mark of a good film.
Paxton makes his directorial debut with this film, and it's an impressive one. While nothing he puts on screen is quite as unsettling as his haircut in Weird Science, his film is still full of some really excellent twists, turns, and shocks. The whole time McConaughey is telling his story to Boothe, both you and Boothe's Doyle have the uneasy feeling that he isn't being completely truthful. You're only getting one side of the story from an unreliable narrator who is at all times both purging his soul and setting us and Doyle up for the film's climax.
Paxton makes several outstanding decisions in the crafting his film. First, he hires three actors who are actually from Texas--himself, McConaughey, and Boothe--to tell the story. Those three principals add a level of realism to the proceedings that grounds the story in creepy stoicism.
Second, Paxton's handling of the child actors is extraordinary. Matthew O'Leary as Young Fenton and Jeremy Sumpter as Young Adam are called upon to both witness and act out some truly horrifying moments. O'Leary and Sumpter (who are on screen much more than their grown-up counterparts) end up giving the best performances in the film.
Third, I was impressed with how well Paxton handled the violence in the film. I'm not gonna sugar-coat it, folks. The Meiks family goes out and abducts people whose names were given to them in Daddy's visions. They take them back to their shed, and either Father Meiks or one of the two kids takes Otis the Ax and .. well, you know, "releases the demon." You never see an ax go into a skull or any other part of the body. What you do get is the perspective of the ax wielder. You see the pleading face of the adducted, bound and gag and writhing on the shed floor in a state of fear and confusion. And you get the two boys' faces as they watch judgment delivered.
Oh, and you get some pretty sick sound effects.
Paxton recently previewed this film at a Dallas theater after which he answered questions from various audience members. From what I've heard, it was a tough audience. They bombarded the actor-director with questions about logic, questions about what was real and what was imagined in the film, and questions about good and evil. I think this Q&A discussion happened too soon after the audience saw the picture. To get the full effect of Frailty, you have to give the movie a little time to settle in your mind after you watch it. It's one of those flicks that gets better and makes more sense the more you THINK about it.
Is Frailty evil? It depends on your belief system. If the Meiks men really are avenging angels, the violence with which they dispatch the "demons" (or, rather, sinners) is straight-up, cold-blooded Old Testament. If they are not, the filmmakers use of God as a device by which to hack up people with axes may be a little much for people. The movie is intended to challenge you, mess with your head. Yes, it will be too much for some audience members. But it will be the ideas and the premise of the film that will be too much, not necessarily the violence or the gore.
Frailty is one movie that is really tough to review. To adequately discuss the story-the WHOLE story-I would have to give away the ending and several of the moments and events that happen before and after the ending. But I absolutely will not do that. How I am discussing this movie with my friends who have seen it is totally different from how I am reviewing it, because so much of my final opinion is locked into the direction the story takes in its final 15 or so minutes.
I'm not going to reveal whether the father's visions are real commands from God, or just delusions. What is most disturbing, though, is that by the time he has the vision, we already know him as a moral and decent man. He doesn't drink to excess or take drugs or abuse his kids. He truly loves his sons. The vision that he has is as sudden and as out-of-the-blue as a visit from the Almighty would surely be. I personally wish Paxton the director had done more to challenge us throughout the film into believing the visions could be real. I think the film leans a little too much to the side that he's probably crazy. Having more of a duality to the proceedings would have made for a much more interesting and dangerous motion picture experience.
In the end, Frailty owes a lot to movies such as Blood Simple, Flowers in the Attic, Unbreakable, and even The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And Paxton owes a lot to his show business cronies. In the ads for this movie, Lions Gate Films offers quotes not from other critics, but from filmmakers that Paxton has worked with in the past. Among them are Sam Raimi (A Simple Plan) and James Cameron (Paxton appeared in his Terminator, Aliens, True Lies, and Titanic).
Yes, indeed, some will find the violence and the angelic imagery in Frailty disturbing. I found Cameron being quoted as a movie critic more disturbing than anything. Hey, J.C., you haven't been behind the camera in six years! Are you THAT gun shy after Titanic? Get over it! Stop putzing around with your Dark Angel TV show and your other side fetishes. Make another movie! You are a motion picture director. You pissed around and lost Spider-Man. You're letting the Terminator franchise continue in lesser hands. You keep threatening us with True Lies 2 and more Tom Arnold on the big screen. I thought you were King of the World?! I thought you were...
Ahem, enough with my ranting. I got a little possessed there. I just hope some crazy Texas family doesn't show up on my doorstep to purge me of my sins. One of those sins might be seeing Frailty. Another sin might be in recommending it. Then again, maybe it's a sin for you to miss it.
It's that kind of flick.
Frailty is rated R for violence, implied violence, and
language. Special kudos go to character actor Alan Davidson, who
plays Brad, one of the Meiks family's targets. Davidson has one of the
best male scream moments ever captured on screen.
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