Cinema
Mad City (15, selected cinemas) Sling Blade (15, selected cinemas)
Dangerous power
Mark Steyn There are two kinds of America in motion pictures: in one, the electronic world — the 'media' — dominates so suffo- catingly that reality is little more than a pallid accompaniment; in the other, the electronic world seems barely to impinge at all, and reality is almost primeval in its raw- ness. Both Americas are cheerfully on show this week.
In Mad City, two decades after Peter Finch and Network, the director Costa- Gavras has belatedly woken up to the dan- gerous power of the modern media. At a natural history museum in Madeline, Cali- fornia, a sacked security guard (John Tra- volta) returns to plead his case yet again with his boss (Blythe Danner, Gwyneth Paltrow's mom). This time, though, he has brought a shotgun and a bagful of dyna- mite. Unfortunately for him, also present that afternoon is a television reporter (Dustin Hoffman), on the outs with the network but biding his time in local news until opportunity presents itself. He quickly realises that this is his ticket back to the big boys, and so, as Travolta's 'hostage', manipulates the situation until it's way beyond the simple blue-collar fellow's con- trol. Incidentally, we know Travolta is sup- posed to be a simple blue-collar fellow because he has bad sideburns. I don't want to read too much into the stick-on whiskers, but it does make you wonder how Costa-Gavras has the nerve to sneer at the cliched shorthand of television.
'Ills a message from Alastair Campbell.' All the usual points are made. Hoffman says to Travolta that, when it's all over, he'll be able to get his own TV show. `You're famous,' he tells him. 'Yeah, but I'm famous in a bad way,' replies Travolta. `It doesn't make any difference on televi- sion,' says Hoffman. Oh, but it does. That's why OJ can't get a gig. But directors of bland star vehicles want you to think there's something unscrupulously manipu- lative out there. That way you won't notice how unscrupulously manipulative their bland star vehicles are. For example, when it comes to the moment where Travolta addresses the camera and presents his demands, Costa-Gavras can't resist adding the squishiest incidental music. So who's he to lecture us on the packaging of our emo- tions by television?
Like Mad City, Sling Blade doesn't have anything terribly fresh to say. Lots of Hol- lywood favourites are here: the mentally retarded man who befriends a young boy, the homosexual with a surer sense of family values than the straight guys .. . But direc- tor/writer/star Billy Bob Thornton's low- key drama is a welcome reminder after Mad City that motion pictures are the art of execution. Sling Blade has nothing very original to say, but it says it brilliantly. Take the very first scene. We see two patients in the Arkansas state mental hos- pital: one of them is Karl, but which is it? The patient facing us is telling the other a crude story about a transsexual hooker he erroneously picked up. Gradually, we realise that the guy who isn't saying a word is, in fact, the star, the protagonist, the one we're supYposed to be paying attention to. Thornton, a first-time director, shows a keen sense of focus: Karl's silent entrance has drawn us into the pace and perspective of the movie.
As Karl himself, Thornton wears his pants hoisted high, his shirt buttoned up and his lower lip folded over the top one in a kind of permanently cheery grimace. He speaks in a gravely drone — `Ah, like them French-fried potatuhs' — punctuated by a weird sound halfway between a throat- clearing and self-agreement — 'Mm- mmmm.' When he was 12, he came upon his mother and a boy from school having sex and killed them with his sling blade (a scythe for corn-cutting). Now, 25 years later, he is to be released from the mental institution and returned to his home town. As soon as we meet Doyle, the abusive boyfriend of Karl's landlady, we know there will, inevitably, be a second episode of vio- lence. The movie is a quiet, absorbing jour- ney between these two points.
What makes the film is the richness and ease of its characters, in performances that make the stellar pairing of Mad City seem tediously small-minded. Here, the best actors get the tiniest parts — J.T. Walsh bookends the picture as Karl's fellow inmate, and Robert Duvall makes a one- scene appearance as his dad. Next come two familiar names in roles you'd never think they were up to — Seventies sitcom star John Ritter plays the town's gay super- market manager in ugly specs and a bad buzz cut, and country singer Dwight Yoakam gives a superbly balanced reading as Doyle, a vicious redneck drunk. Filling out the cast are odds and ends like Rick Dial, a real-life high-school pal of Thorn- ton's pressed into service as the boss of the auto shop where Karl works. Under the film's non-flashy direction, Dial blends in with the Equity old-timers superbly: after Karl fixes up his first engine, Dial says, 'I'll just be damned.' I don't know whether that `just' was his idea or Thornton's script, but it's pure Arkansas and part of Sling Blade's rare authenticity.
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