THE SLAUGHTER RULE (Alex and Andrew J. Smith, 2002)

Written and directed by Montana twins Alex and Andrew J. Smith, The Slaughter Rule is a muddled and preposterous coming-of-age melodrama about a Montana teenager. The team’s first feature frustrates by never quite disclosing its narrative hand; nor does its indirection and equivocations accumulate into anything approaching genuine ambiguity. It’s all just a mess despite a fine lead performance by Ryan Gosling (who was superb as the Jewish neo-Nazi in Henry Bean’s compelling The Believer, 2001), and sometimes extraordinary editing by Brent White.

The lead character is Roy, a 17-year-old high school student who isn’t once shown cracking a book. The slender, quiet boy is cut from the football team for not being angry enough; “you got no gumption,” the grammatically challenged coach tells him. This disappointment compounds another, deeper loss; for Roy’s estranged father, who also played football, has just been crushed to death by a train, a likely suicide. (At the reception after the funeral, we cannot help but note that the widow, Roy’s father’s second wife, is flanked on either side by a twin boy. Autobiography?) Back home, Roy confronts his mother for not having attended the funeral. She fires back the one moving line in the film: “Our divorce was funeral enough for me.”

In a bewilderingly circuitous way, Roy’s quest in the film is to determine the cause of his father’s death. It appears that his father was tormented by his closeted homosexuality, in the process of discovering which Roy also realizes his own homosexual orientation. There are three equally silly mechanisms for this farfetched revelation. One is the comment made by his girlfriend, a honky tonk barmaid named Skyla, after they make love; she tells him that their whack in the sack just didn’t feel right to her. Too, Roy is being relentlessly pursued, fatherly-romantically, by the semi-closeted local butt of queer jokes, the hapless Gideon Ferguson, the close-to-homeless schemer/dreamer who has recruited Roy for the six-boy football team he coaches. Roy ultimately assaults Ferguson, both verbally and physically, publicly branding him a queer as he battles at the same time against himself behind the façade of his schoolboy machismo. But everything falls into place when, fleeing Ferguson, whom he has left bleeding to death on the ground, Roy is stopped short at tracks across which a train speeds by, permitting him to piece together his father’s homosexuality, Gideon’s and his own. The only thing contesting the fatuousness and silliness of all this angst and bother is that the film is so deceptive, and possibly so self-deceptive, that no viewer can be sure of anything, including anybody’s gayness here. I think things happen as I’ve just described them, but it’s hard to fathom the possibility of any two such persons as could come up with this nonsense. Perhaps the Smith brothers haven’t cracked a book between themselves, either—or observed any aspect of any sort of reality.

They have made a film that’s creepy without being in the least illuminating. The scene in his skid-row apartment when Ferguson makes all sorts of weird confessions to Roy and presses his gay overtures is very nearly the most distasteful thing I’ve seen in a movie. It helps little that David Morse, who plays Ferguson, gives a dreadful performance throughout, mugging, striking attitudes, emoting to beat the band—doing everything but delineating some coherent concept of the character. If Morse had gained points by his competent appearance in Lars von Trier’s sensational Dancer in the Dark (2000), he loses them all here, and even now owes us a brace of them.

Both Roy and Gideon have a close friend who ends up badly—one, dead, in fact. Roy’s friend is a Blackfoot boy interracially named Tracy Two Dogs. (Look, the name is better than Skyla!) Gideon’s friend, an alcoholic and perhaps a lover, but likely only a quasi-lover (because that’s the way of this obscuring movie), is Studebaker, who lives in his car.

Alongside Gosling’s good work, Kelly Lynch registers well as the boy’s fragile, deeply disturbed mother. Alas, her part is only a few minutes long. A more honest, more searching film related to the themes cropping up might have been structured as an extended conversation between mother and son.

The cinematographer, Eric Alan Edwards, worked with John J. Campbell on the magnificent My Own Private Idaho (1991), and he even reprises Gus Van Sant’s penchant for time-lapsed skies. But little in the Smiths’ cheap film exists for anything other than effect.

The Slaughter Rule’s ugly title warrants an explanation. The rule is this: No matter how much time remains on the clock, a team playing football is automatically declared the winner if it amasses a 45-point advantage over the opposing team.

Rah rah rah.

KYTICE (F. A. Brabec, 2000)

F. A. Brabec’s Kytice, called also in the U.S. Wildflowers (although the Czech title actually translates as The Garland or The Bouquet) comprises seven of the original twelve dark fairy tales included in the 1853 book by Karel Jaromír Erben. Given the date of Erben’s book (which I’ve never read—until the film, never heard of), I was pleased to find that the material is very Victorian, very Christina Rossetti “Goblin Market”-y. But I didn’t really care for the film.
     Subscribers to the IMDb call the film “visually beautiful.” I would call it, rather, “pretty.” All in all, the color cinematography, by Brabec himself, is rather too soft and luminous for the dark tales. A better fit, perhaps, would have been Newton Thomas Sigel’s cinematography for Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm (2005).
     Another thing: two or three of the stories are exceptionally hard to follow.
     One thing more: ridiculously, some compare this film to Akira Kurosawa and Ishirô Honda’s Dreams (1990). Actually, Brabec’s film struck me as being closer to Bergman than to Kurosawa, but religious/superstitious rather than skeptical.      Lots of lovely pictures, a boy connecting the tales on a haunting penny whistle, and a cache of cruelty, some of it a bit misogynistic.
     Lots of camera tricks and staging tricks: time-lapsed skies, eerily lovely slow motion (such as of a girl falling into the sea), people flying, etc.