Film Club Featurette: Sling Blade (1995)

On Saturday evening, 5 February at 18:31, the Phnom Penh Film Club curls up with the tense and claustrophobic small-town drama, *Sling Blade* (1995), written and directed by-- and starring Billy Bob Thornton.

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Most supposedly underrated actors are either rated that way by everyone, or else "underrated" on account of not actually being very talented. Billy Bob Thornton is an exception, and one need look no further for the proof than his virtuoso performance in the leading role of this deeply unnerving film. Many actors have played 'sympathetic violent' and many have played 'credibly impaired', but few have carried both so artfully -- so damn *well* -- much less in the same role in the same film. 

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The movie begins with a collegiate journalist interviewing mentally challenged killer Karl Childers (Thornton), soon to be released from the institution in which he has spent the bulk of his life after slaying his mother and her lover as a child. Upon release Childers settles in a nearby small town, whereupon he is quickly befriended by a precocious and trusting young boy. The boy's family welcomes Karl unconditionally, save for a dour stepfather who, on closer inspection, seems to be slipping further and further into alcoholism and disempowered rage. In due course Childers secures a job as a lawn mower repair technician, visits his estranged father, confesses a horrifying childhood trauma to his young confidant, and, ultimately, finds himself called upon to do the one right thing that only Karl himself can do. 

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The film was shot on location in Benton, Arkansas -- capturing a vaguely uneasy pathos for the principal cast by implying a vaguely uneasy pathos in their immediate surroundings. Multiple tracks by atmospheric French Canadian musician Daniel Lanois only underscore the minor-note, vaguely off-kilter feel of the project, about which not a single fiber is out of place. The resulting film won the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay, and Billy Bob Thornton won best actor no fewer than five times at assorted independent film festivals around the world. Writing for the Los Angeles Times, master critic Kevin Thomas deemed Sling Blade "a mesmerizing parable of good and evil and a splendid example of Southern storytelling at its most poetic and imaginative."

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I hope everyone will plan to join us Saturday at 18:31 for this remarkable and chilling southern Gothic, painstakingly crafted and brilliantly acted and composed.