Lou Ford’s father was a doctor, and though he hides his intellect behind folksy platitudes Lou was more than capable of following dad’s footsteps. But Lou got stuck maybe, as deputy sheriff in the ironically named backwater of Central City, Texas, and as the reluctant betrothed to a local schoolteacher named Amy. The couple “just drifted together like straws in a puddle.” Those are Lou’s words, or rather Jim Thompson’s, whose 1952 novel The Killer Inside Me, one of this infernally gifted author’s most incisive portraits of a doomed and deranged mind, serves as the basis for the same-titled movie from director Michael Winterbottom. Scripted by John Curran with considerable fidelity to its source material, it’s an admirable, slick, horrifying and problematic adaptation, and is now available on home video.
Lou’s sent to run a prostitute named Joyce out of town, but when he delivers the message Joyce attacks him, and a cloud of ice drapes over Lou’s normally placid face. He retaliates with brute force, only to discover that beatings and bondage are Joyce’s cup of tea. They become lovers, but soon Lou gets an idea for a way to exact revenge on a local big shot, an idea that involves murdering both the big shot’s son and Joyce. Killing Joyce is supposed to exorcise “the sickness,” which is how Lou describes his fearsome urge to exact violence on others, women especially—women who love him most especially. But the sickness only spreads and one killing just leads to another, until simple plan slips into apocalyptic parody.
The casting of Casey Affleck as Lou is inspired both for his physicality—Thompson described Lou as lean and wiry, clean-cut, friendly, and 29—and his vocal peculiarity, that voice that creaks like an asthmatic 12-year-old. Affleck was the best thing in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and exhibits similarly creepy nuance and repressed ferocity here. Jessica Alba as Joyce is inspired in a different way. Her supple performance aside, it’s her sweet, heartbreaking smile that helps make it so difficult to witness Lou pounding her face in like a cantaloupe. The killings in The Killer Inside Me are appalling yet somehow detached at the same time, perhaps because Melissa Parmenter and Joel Cadbury’s score is so heavy with portent it takes you out of the moment.
Stunning moments abound, not the least being Lou’s final encounter with Amy, smartly played by Kate Hudson. But there are other issues keeping The Killer Inside Me from being as penetrating as it could have been and more alienating that it probably needs to be. There’s a moment in the novel where Lou explicitly states that he is literally writing what we’re reading, which we ultimately come to realize is deliciously nonsensical. Thompson was a masterful handler of the unreliable narrator, and many of the claims made in Lou’s first-person account become suspect. This is a precarious thing to realize on screen since the imagination is so much more powerful and flexible than the framed, explicit image, particularly when trying to register Thompson's violence. To read it is deeply disturbing; to see it is merely disgusting.
“There’s an interesting face,” Jessica Alba says upon her first glimpse of Danny Trejo in Machete. It’s an observation that’s surely followed Trejo around his whole life. The beloved ex-con, boxer and character actor is 66 now and has been in well over 100 movies, yet, if we don’t count Champion, the documentary about Trejo’s life, Machete marks his debut as a lead. Trejo’s always been a welcome presence wherever he turns up, that distinctively weathered and initially frightening face that masks a terrifically deadpan sense of humour. He’s exactly the sort of perpetual background player film-lovers long to see promoted to the spotlight, yet thanks to largely half-assed conception, Trejo’s star moment as Machete’s eponymous ex-federale hero may just constitute the least interesting performance he’s given.
Written by Robert Rodriguez and his cousin Álvaro, and directed by Rodriguez and his longtime editor Ethan Maniquis, Machete is the fitfully entertaining extrapolation of a trailer featured in Grindhouse, the exploitation homage collaboration between Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. Predictably, Machete plays like a convoy of trailers, united by a plot crammed with corrupt Texan politicians and underground revolutionaries that’s more busy than it is cohesive or even coherent. The lack of narrative elegance is of course part of the movie’s ostensible charm, but what starts out as prankish plot holes and playful implausibilities increasingly feels like lazy screenwriting. What resembles button-pushing political commentary rapidly reveals itself to be flamboyantly irrelevant. Rodriquez uses pastiche as an opportunity to rest on cliché. Clichés can make marvelous tools when animated, but Rodriguez frequently seems content to simply prop them up as platforms for yet another set piece.
Bereft of anything like emotions, ambitions or conflicts, Trejo is left mostly with one-liners, some of them quite deftly delivered—I especially liked “Machete don’t text.” Converted to the side of the desperate migrant workers she used to deport, Alba’s immigration cop becomes the resident cheerleader: “There’s the law, and there’s what’s right!” The rest is one-joke stunt casting: Robert De Niro’s an ultra-right wing senator; Don Johnson, in aviator shades, cowboy hat and shark fin sideburns, is a cop who slaughters Mexicans for sport; Lindsay Lohan stretches out to play a rich girl with a drug problem and a hunger for publicity; Steven Segal’s a drug lord with an absurd toupee. Cheech Marin’s a priest with a penchant for weed.
Machete’s most inspired, or at least liveliest bits arrive through a creative attitude toward the human body—a lady retrieves a telephone from her vagina. The killing is gleefully rampant and mercifully cartoonish, with fountains of digital splatter and everything that vaguely resembles a sharp object eventually impaling somebody—kudos to whoever thought of the meat thermometer. Thing is, Machete’s funniest display of violence is decidedly non-lethal, with Trejo warding off a bodyguard by slapping his wrists with a weed whacker. I suppose he could have just chopped his arm off or unspoiled his intestines like he does in so many other confrontations, but in a movie that thrives on excess it’s amazing how far a little restraint can go to win you over. When Trejo and the bodyguard finally part ways the latter is left caged to a wall with pruning shears, no doubt happy just to be alive. He never knew what hit him.
