Kirstiecat | Blog

I give this film an 8/10.

I saw this film in Grant Park last night for the first time. The cinematography is brilliant and stark; also very well suited to the intensity of the film. It’s an astonishing and complex character study of what society coloquially terms a psychopath and what the DSM-IV calls a person with Antisocial Personality Disorder.

Let’s stop right here for a moment. If you haven’t read Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” then you should do so. Right now. Go ahead! It was written in 1953 so it’s quite conceivable that it may have inspired this film. It’s very dark but it has bits of old small town conversation. Still, the essence of it is that you really can’t trust anyone.

The main character in this film claims to be a preacher and when he isn’t killing widows for their money, he’s singing a haunting rendition of “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” I swear, if I ever hear that song again, it will give me the heeby jeebies so bad! There’s quite a bit of religion in this but it’s mainly misguided and jaded and completely creepy. Mitchum plays the male lead of Powell so well and adeptly that you really feel truly there is no way he could possibly be more evil. He has absolutely no remorse for the people he kills and he charismatically twists stories so that the dumb townspeople fall for it. And what a sad little town it is with kids running all along the Ohio river begging for food with seemingly no parents and old men who have been talking to pictures of their dead wives for twenty years. They are really just sort of waiting to be preyed upon by true evil. And, of course, when he presents himself as a preacher, they don’t even question it.

There are two criticisms I have of this film and, unfortunately, they are pretty blatant. The first one is that I didn’t like the depiction of women. In some ways, I think they were saying something about how religion can be like an infection and, for some reason, when people get a small taste, they get completely obsessed and absorbed into it. It truly has mass brain washing potential. But still…the female lead, Shelley Winters just gets talked into marrying this guy so easily and on their wedding night, he refuses to even consummate it and makes her feel completely guilty and ashamed. It’s so wrong. (He later twists this story completely) But she is so naive and trusting and almost to a point and I resented it. This is the minor of the two criticisms, though, because we do see a smart and capable woman in the second half who reads the Bible but isn’t a mass murderer.

Truly the worst fatal flaw of the film imo is the way the part of the little girl is written. This little girl is young, maybe three or four and in the film she actually trusts this “preacher” like her mother (the older brother who is probably 10 or so is the only one who seems wise to anything for the majority of the film).

Let me tell you people, I know children. And there’s no way in the world a kid her age is going to trust someone who threatens to rip her arms off. That’s totally unrealistic and absurd. Oh and he threatens to kill her brother too, nice guy. This is all so he can get his hands on the money their biological father stole in the first sequence of the film, which their mother doesn’t know about, hidden in the little girl’s (Pearl’s) doll.

So at it’s best, it’s a frightening portrait of a killer, a deeply entrenched religous film, and quite an intense thriller (there were parts of this film, I had to shut my eyes and bury my face into Grant Park grass but Cinchel said I was overacting. Hmph! I never overreact!). At its worse, it’s foolish and overlooks and oversimplifies important aspects of human nature.

(now playing: Aimee Mann: Bachelor No.2)

Btw, you can find Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find on the internet here:

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/goodman.html

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 11th, 2005 at 12:03 am and is filed under films. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.