a Texas Funeral: (1999. dir: W. Blake Herron) These two movies are extraordinarily well-suited to viewing as a double-feature. They're both family gatherings instigated by the death of a figure of near-legendary proportions, and they're both character-studies leavened, with varying levels of success, with a strong dose of whimsy.
Martin Sheen is Sparta Whit, a larger-than-life, camel-raising, land-rich Texan whose death affects all the life-sized people comprising the next generations of his family. Joanne Whalley is his institutionalized, nymphomaniac daughter, Chris Noth his inscrutable nephew, Olivia D'Abo his frightened niece-in-law. Grace Zabriskie is fantastic as his white-haired, sensuous wife, driven near-mad with lust for what is cagily referred to throughout as "the power of the male Whit ear."
No one has ever been better than Robert Patrick at playing the problematic "man's-man" father who doesn't understand his sensitive son. I've watched him create at least three different versions, and they're none of them carbon copies, all distinctly three-dimensional humans. Compare this one, Zach Whit, a good-hearted, straightforward man who is genuinely bemused by a son who begs for the life of an earthworm about to be used as bait, takes a vow of silence after being told to shut up, and runs away, terrified, when the hunting rifles come out, to the more stoical and wiser Jack Aarons in Bridge to Terabithia, and both of those to his brilliantly courageous turn as the hard-edged Ray Cash in Walk the Line.
Jayne Mansfield's Car: (2012. dir: Billy Bob Thornton) The vibrant, life-loving matriarch of two families, one in Alabama, the other in England, has died and asked to be transported back to the States for burial, bringing the two disparate clans together for the first time. This is about fathers and sons and their ridiculously difficult relations. It's also about war, and how it affects men's opinions of themselves, of one another, and of the world they live in.
Thornton's two best virtues as a director are a fearlessness in taking his own time telling a story and a wonderful regard for those small strangenesses that make us all, even the most "normal" of us, eccentric and individual. His films are more interested in character than story. He takes the time to linger, for example, on a boy at the Jayne Mansfield exhibit, a boy with one line who will not figure again into the story, lets us watch him look at a crude sketch of Mansfield on the wall, then impulsively reach forward and give the picture a peck on the cheek.
This movie is filled with great moments. Here's one of my favorites: Patrick plays the stodgiest of the yank brothers, the only one who didn't see action in war-time. Embittered and driven by his exclusion from the enclave of war heroes around him, he has over-compensated with success in the peace-time world, while his damaged and disillusioned brothers can barely manage to live in it. As the tensions of the family gathering mount and that awful "Thanksgiving" brand of claustrophobia takes its hold, the one that comes of being trapped in a house with too many family members, your secrets and flaws known to all, the alcohol flows in attempt to allay the hideousness and pass the time. After a particularly vulnerable, difficult scene in which the British son (Ray Stevenson, wonderful) at last publicly confronts his father about denigrating his war service because he spent the bulk of it in a prison-camp, Patrick's suburban, middle-class wife breaks into a fit of giggles and suddenly kisses her husband passionately. Surprised, he responds, and they start making out drunkenly on the couch in front of the two older patriarchs. It is a wonderful, human moment, the like of which I've never seen anywhere else, and it may well have been the fuclrum upon which my Robert Patrick film festival first turned.
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