Dir. James Marsh, 2005, US/UK, 105 mins
Cast: Gael García Bernal, William Hurt, Pell James, Paul Dano, Laura Harring
Review by Richard Dilks
The King tries to instil a luminescence of understanding in its viewer. Sometimes it succeeds; mainly, it fails. Elvis (Gael García Bernal) is in the lead role. His kingdom encompasses illegitimacy, semi-incest, murder and various people’s sight of God.
The film opens promisingly with Bernal’s expressive, moisturised face peering enquiringly into the church service of Pastor David (William Hurt). Afterwards, Elvis follows the reverend father and his family and talks with him by the roadside. Elvis reveals himself as the pastor’s son, a product of a less straight-and-narrow time in the pastor’s life. It is an excellently shot and acted scene (Bernal’s delivery of ‘Her name was Yolanda’ is delicious), with a sharp use of furtive looks in rear-view mirrors as the star pastor’s past parks up behind him, and dialogue that lets the talents of Hurt and Bernal shine with a similar resonance to the desirable light they are standing in.
If only the rest of the plot allowed them more opportunities to shine. But the mists created by a demented plot and cinematographical confusion descend soon after and grow in intensity, until by the end, all that is clear is that the audacious crane shot, revealing the final plot turn, must have taken ages to set up.
Bernal makes the most of a too turbulent part, endowing the wild but predictable plot twists with as much dewy intensity as he can muster. Hurt, too, wrestles through his role as best he might. The women have an even less sure footing to work from, and the incredibility of their roles is not the fault of Laura Harring as the pastor’s wife Twyla, or Pell James, scrubbed down to an epitome of budding pubescence, as the pastor’s daughter and his new-found son’s lover. Though the plot’s resolution depends on their love, I was convinced neither by the attraction between them nor by the father’s approving reaction to the relationship.
We never find out the motivation for Bernal moving to this town, taking a dreadful job, and killing his way through his new family. Are we to presume that he is so consumed by jealousy for what his father has, having been turned down for the Honour Guard and discharged from the Marines? If so, what are his motives in seducing his father’s daughter? Further revenge? It’s all played sweetly, which is why the murders seem so placeless, with no signposting and no supporting menace in Bernal’s character. And we can’t just revel in an American psycho’s performance, for the film is written, played and shot with a straightforwardness that doesn’t leave room for irony.
The difficulty of subverting the rules of mainstream cinema – a sympathetic character, signalling what is going to happen – is that you have to offer something else in their stead. The King has nothing in place to do this.
All the film’s triumphs of texture (the sweat on the father’s hand as he hunts deer, the blood from the deer’s carcass on the garage floor) and understanding of tension (the murder of Paul, the pastor’s son (Paul Dano), the daughter waiting to see the result of her pregnancy test) cannot weave the plot into a satisfying pattern.
And some parts are just tired - the welling of a hiss-hum background noise after moments of trauma for Elvis – as we are after watching it. James Marsh also made Wisconsin Death Trip; this death trip is a trip too far.
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