With a gifted character actor like Bill Paxton, whose face can change from goofy rube to menacing backwoods hellraiser in the same take, there was ample material in “Frailty” to suggest a gloriously wicked black comedy. As his sanity gradually dissolves in a sudden and harrowing turn toward religious fanaticism, Paxton has many opportunities as writer and director to draw out the comedy inherent in what is, at heart, the story of a single dad raising his two beloved sons. If it weren’t for all that blood, the film has all the makings of a heartwarming coming of age tale, as the two boys spend quality time with their widowed father learning how to be men. Except, in this case, rather than playing catch and helping fix the engine in the old Buick, Paxton’s kids are learning how to kidnap old men in parking lots and dump dismembered bodies into open graves. The laughs are there to be had in this dark variation of fatherly love, but the mark of the film’s power to mesmerize is that the humor is always crowded out by an eerie tension that manages at times to invoke Jack Nicholson’s lurching lunatic in “The Shining”.
No, “Frailty” keeps its head because of its director’s fastidiousness. All the details are presented with a skillful eye, down to the dimensions of the hole and the nails that are pounded into the cellar door. What grounds it, in other words, is the reality of the mise èn scene, the absolute familiarity of the world these characters inhabit, which Paxton renders with understated precision. The jack-in-the-box ending is a dud—veterans of “The Usual Suspects” know you can’t trust a dodgy man sitting in a cop’s office telling his story in flashback—but the sustained chill of the narrative sets “Frailty” apart. Had Paxton and company used “Stand By Me” as their model rather than “Seven”, “Frailty” might have been a classic; the subplot involving Powers Boothe is a needless detour that plunges the story into anti-climax. As it stands, the film is a sporadically horrifying look at the fallibility of the mind, but also, more simply, the dangers of blindly following authority, be it imaginary or paternal. |
