This movie treats us, for the most part, to well developed acting, a production evoking effective atmosphere, and a cunning screenplay.
After the plot began to thicken I wished, just as someone else here predicted, that I had paid more attention to the beginning. Of course I was on the lookout for red herrings-- it just couldn't remain as pat and straightforward as it started-- but for the most part I couldn't spot them in advance. At this level my suspension of disbelief was strained only by the spectacle of a cop letting himself be inveigled out of his headquarters in the middle of a stormy night, bound for parts unknown, alone with an apparently invaluable but sinister-acting witness. FBI agents have a lot of egg on their faces lately, but they're not *that* stupid, are they?
In a vacuum, this is altogether a well-done thriller. Perhaps examples of the genre should be left at that. But I can never do so. After seeing any film or drama, I wonder what it means. What truth is it showing us? At least, the shores of what island ineffable is it lapping us around? If none, then the experience is a waste of money at best-- but we must even suspect a meal of lies, to be warned against as surely as children from poisons under the kitchen sink.
I have spent my life in several regions of the U.S., but have never lived in Texas. I'm afraid that my impression of this state is unattractive. It looks like the home of upstanding citizens supremely confident in their own righteousness, striding less easily than appears atop a criminal class so singularly violent and incorrigible as to call for the country's most butt-kicking enforcement apparatus. The last part of this image is demonstrable enough. As it is of the Texans' own making and theoretically mutable (albeit characteristic of such creations to outstay their welcome) they are presumably proud of it.
Needless to say, a governor of Texas who never contravened a death sentence now sits in the Oval Office. His Attorney General cries out for more and more police power nearly every time he opens his mouth.
This is not entirely, er, a dead issue. Life imitates art.
Yet perhaps the first part of this impression is just one ignorant Yankee's prejudice. Frailty, however, is set in Texas, and one can't see it fitting anywhere else. A viewer can say, "ah, yes, well, at least this impression is not mine alone." Truth or lie? Among the many verdicts and analyses that have had the opportunity to emerge after a couple months, maybe I missed some chorus of protest from Texans that it has traduced their state.
The film presents an interesting character: the two polar opposites above fused into a single individual. It bids us wonder, is this union as improbable and fantastic as at first blush? Or is it (at least in Texas) plausible-- perhaps, even, as radically inevitable as the two sides of a coin? As if this question were not intriguing enough in itself, add that the catalyst for the fusion is a remarkably rootless and solipsistic sense of religion. This is another phenomenon for which Texas seems especially hospitable. Remember Koresh in Waco?
Here's where the film might be said, if not to tell lies, at least to skirt dangerously close. We see two brothers walking home from school, past tidy white halls with steeples, singing (one distinctly more eagerly than the other) a song that people learn to sing in there. Aren't we to think that they have enjoyed a Christian upbringing? So when their loving father starts talking, one night, of a grisly mission from "God," as revealed to him by "an angel", are we or are we not meant to think that this conceit has something whatever to do with Christianity? I'm here to say that it has nothing to do with Christianity as I know it, nor as history knows it.
Whatever religion it is, one critic (not, I pray, a representative Texan) was impressed enough to say, this film will make you believe.
Believe what? That some who walk the earth in human form are not humans but demons, and that the God of either Christians or Jews appoints certain followers to take the law into their own "Hands" and destroy them? This I must take to be a lie. "God's Hand" may, indeed, have been visited by an angel. But not all angels speak for God.
There is another interpretation. "Believe" indeed: that there is nothing to which a religious fanaticism unchecked by scripture, reason, tradition, and a sense of sacred community might not impel a deluded follower. And that here we see a human/demon dichotomy exposed as a _reductio ad absurdam_, which less clearly exposed fosters and drives the criminal justice system of-- well, I guess it's up to all citizens, isn't it, to determine where.
If this is what "Frailty" teaches us to believe, I'm ready. Like that of "Apt Pupil", it is a thoroughly unpleasant message. But if the message is true, far be it from me to kill the messenger.
After the plot began to thicken I wished, just as someone else here predicted, that I had paid more attention to the beginning. Of course I was on the lookout for red herrings-- it just couldn't remain as pat and straightforward as it started-- but for the most part I couldn't spot them in advance. At this level my suspension of disbelief was strained only by the spectacle of a cop letting himself be inveigled out of his headquarters in the middle of a stormy night, bound for parts unknown, alone with an apparently invaluable but sinister-acting witness. FBI agents have a lot of egg on their faces lately, but they're not *that* stupid, are they?
In a vacuum, this is altogether a well-done thriller. Perhaps examples of the genre should be left at that. But I can never do so. After seeing any film or drama, I wonder what it means. What truth is it showing us? At least, the shores of what island ineffable is it lapping us around? If none, then the experience is a waste of money at best-- but we must even suspect a meal of lies, to be warned against as surely as children from poisons under the kitchen sink.
I have spent my life in several regions of the U.S., but have never lived in Texas. I'm afraid that my impression of this state is unattractive. It looks like the home of upstanding citizens supremely confident in their own righteousness, striding less easily than appears atop a criminal class so singularly violent and incorrigible as to call for the country's most butt-kicking enforcement apparatus. The last part of this image is demonstrable enough. As it is of the Texans' own making and theoretically mutable (albeit characteristic of such creations to outstay their welcome) they are presumably proud of it.
Needless to say, a governor of Texas who never contravened a death sentence now sits in the Oval Office. His Attorney General cries out for more and more police power nearly every time he opens his mouth.
This is not entirely, er, a dead issue. Life imitates art.
Yet perhaps the first part of this impression is just one ignorant Yankee's prejudice. Frailty, however, is set in Texas, and one can't see it fitting anywhere else. A viewer can say, "ah, yes, well, at least this impression is not mine alone." Truth or lie? Among the many verdicts and analyses that have had the opportunity to emerge after a couple months, maybe I missed some chorus of protest from Texans that it has traduced their state.
The film presents an interesting character: the two polar opposites above fused into a single individual. It bids us wonder, is this union as improbable and fantastic as at first blush? Or is it (at least in Texas) plausible-- perhaps, even, as radically inevitable as the two sides of a coin? As if this question were not intriguing enough in itself, add that the catalyst for the fusion is a remarkably rootless and solipsistic sense of religion. This is another phenomenon for which Texas seems especially hospitable. Remember Koresh in Waco?
Here's where the film might be said, if not to tell lies, at least to skirt dangerously close. We see two brothers walking home from school, past tidy white halls with steeples, singing (one distinctly more eagerly than the other) a song that people learn to sing in there. Aren't we to think that they have enjoyed a Christian upbringing? So when their loving father starts talking, one night, of a grisly mission from "God," as revealed to him by "an angel", are we or are we not meant to think that this conceit has something whatever to do with Christianity? I'm here to say that it has nothing to do with Christianity as I know it, nor as history knows it.
Whatever religion it is, one critic (not, I pray, a representative Texan) was impressed enough to say, this film will make you believe.
Believe what? That some who walk the earth in human form are not humans but demons, and that the God of either Christians or Jews appoints certain followers to take the law into their own "Hands" and destroy them? This I must take to be a lie. "God's Hand" may, indeed, have been visited by an angel. But not all angels speak for God.
There is another interpretation. "Believe" indeed: that there is nothing to which a religious fanaticism unchecked by scripture, reason, tradition, and a sense of sacred community might not impel a deluded follower. And that here we see a human/demon dichotomy exposed as a _reductio ad absurdam_, which less clearly exposed fosters and drives the criminal justice system of-- well, I guess it's up to all citizens, isn't it, to determine where.
If this is what "Frailty" teaches us to believe, I'm ready. Like that of "Apt Pupil", it is a thoroughly unpleasant message. But if the message is true, far be it from me to kill the messenger.