As you have all been aware and since I spent two post so far talking about one of his movies, I really like William Friedkin as a director (despite the fact that I probably have been spelling his last name wrong) and thought that maybe I should talk about his movies in more of a simplified manner than trying to be a pretentious asshole and have a ton of snark and snobbishness in my words. As for the order of the movies, I think I'll have no specific order in which I'll cover them, just letting whatever which movie I feel like talking about be the one that I'll post. I'll probably avoid his documentaries since I have been reading his memoir from which the title of this series comes from, they were made just for the masses and were not really something he considered his own work aside from The People vs. Paul Crump but I probably won't cover that either since he doesn't like it all that much anymore from the sounds of things. I might cover some TV work he's done, such as Nightcrawlers from the 1985 version of The Twilight Zone and the 1997 version of 12 Angry Men, but for the most part I'll be talking about his theatrical releases, starting from the 1967 Sonny and Cher movie Good Times to today's topic, 2012's Killer Joe
His most recent release to date, Killer Joe is Friedkin's second collaboration with playwright Tracy Letts (the first being 2007's Bug) based off of the latter's first written play which premiered in 1993. It can be hard to say what I was actually expecting when I first heard of it through a top 10 list of an internet reviewer I really love listening to, yet the 20-30 seconds of his thoughts made me really want to find a copy of the movie and it took a little bit of time but I finally got my hands on it and sat down and watched it. That initial viewing was something of a fever dream, where I often didn't know how to feel since there were moments in the movie that were really funny, some that were tense, and some that were gruesome. It took me a lot longer that it should have to realize that the movie itself was intended to be a black comedy, which is strange since I do enjoy black comedy a lot. The most bare bone plot description I could give would be that a drug dealer owes some guys money so he hires a hitman to kill his mother for the insurance. Shit goes really fucking wrong soon after, hilarity and terror ensues, the kind of thing that Friedkin has been doing for many years.
The casting is one of those things that really does make the movie a lot better than it has any right to be, since in the eyes of most critics of the play, the characters barely make it past the stereotypes of Texans of the like, which I think Letts has agreed on and attributed that to how it was his first play. Let's start with the highest profile person in the movie, Matthew McConaughey as Joe Cooper. I was probably with the majority of people who saw the guy as being part of the ilk of rom-coms that plagued the cinemas throughout most of the past decade or so and didn't really think he was all that good. Although the past few years, that opinion has changed since he has gotten more serious roles such as this one and for the most part, this role does allow him to play off of people's expectations and go into more darker territory as a detective who moonlights as a hitman. He does a fantastic job here and while I haven't really seen much of his work since, it does make one look forward of what he has in store. Which could also apply to Emile Hirsch as well, who in this movie plays Chris, the character who pretty much sets up the entire going ons of the film. The character does come off like an ass for the most part, whose only redeeming quality is that he deeply cares for his sister (maybe a little too much as I'll get into later) which might be enough since the movie is about how he owes people money and he wants to kill his mom. This role at times could amount to "Chris gets beat up on a regular basis, really fucking badly" especially in the climax of the movie which is one of my favorites in a film. Yet Emile manages to, like I said in the beginning, elevate the material he has to work with and makes the character more interesting as we can see how coming up with a plan without really thinking it out makes things really easy to get fucked up really quickly.
This paragraph I am going to dedicate specifically to the actress who plays the role of Dottie, Chris' sister and later Joe's love interest, Juno Temple. This was only the second movie that she was in that I saw (updated: she was in The Dark Knight Rises but I'm not counting that since she was barely in it), the first being Mr Nobody, which is one of those movies that is really hard to talk about due to how it goes off into a ton of directions and the themes are really hard to describe in a compelling way, which is why I have yet to write about it. She managed to make a huge impression on me in that movie though and I do look forward to her future work, having only seen her in a bit part in Lovelace since. Reading The Friedkin Connection section regarding the making of this movie brought to my attention two other actresses that were initially cast in the role before Bill saw the audition tape Juno made, those being Ellen Page and Jennifer Lawrence. The first one I could kind of see why since she had done a lot of dark work such as Hard Candy yet for some reason she dropped out after only two days. The latter was the most surprising and from the memoir, she was really committed to doing the movie, having gotten off the buzz she had from Winter's Bone yet before she has become the huge star she is today. Trying to see her in the role, it could have worked and probably would have rendered the whole recent scandal regarding leaked photos kind of useless. Yet in the end, I could only see Juno playing this girl. She just makes it easy to see Dottie as being a pure innocent, someone who has managed to either be naive to whatever goes on with the plan yet never seems as if she has some sort of learning disability/ She is an outsider even among her family which does make her future relationship with Joe make sense since he too is an outsider due to his job after hours. It is really hard to make someone appear naive yet not stupid, for lack of a better word, yet it works well here.
The rest of the cast does a good job. Thomas Haden Church as Ansel, Chris and Dottie's dad, really does a good job, acting as sort of the straight man role, the guy who see all of this ridiculous stuff happen and reacts the way that perhaps the audience themselves are, yet sometimes he has this sort of "I'm too tired of this shit" aloofness that does add a lot of the humor to a lot of situations. And then there is Gina Gershon as Sharla, Ansel's second wife, who really does a great job and really sells one of the most notorious scenes of the movie (Chicken leg. Just chicken leg.). Watching the movie again, it is shown a lot that Sharla does have a lot more going for her than she lets on and turns out to be at least one step ahead of Chris. Gina was cast in the film to make up for the fact that Letts really wanted her in the play but due to the commitments that would entail, that never went through but at least she got to be in this and the wait was probably worth it.
I really don't want to get into too many spoilers here since it is a black comedy at heart, it would give away a lot of the humor and I don't want to be the jackass who does that sort of thing, so I'll just get into one of the things that I found really interesting and worth talking about: the relationships Joe, Chris and Dottie. Early on in the movie, Chris arrives at his dad's trailer, asking for his sister to open the door to let him in, after being kicked out of his mom's place (which I didn't get the first time. Stupid moment, I know). After a couple of scenes, where the plan is introduced, Chris has a dream of his sister standing naked in the middle of the tiny hallway, followed by a karate pose. I kind of see this as him having this sort of deep seated incest inklings toward his sister which comes from how she is the only person in his family that he can depend on and that cares about him. This feeling of love does play later when they meet Joe and have no way to pay him in advance so he decides that he'll take Dottie as a retainer, which Chris is immediately against yet relents since he can see no other way to get the job done. The first meeting between Joe and Dottie goes along well yet she still feels used a bit when a date is set up between the two so that they can get to know each other better, yet they manage to get over that. The date scene is one that I am struggling to figure out whether or not Joe was using Dottie in that situation or that he is just as nervous as she is. I think I can go with the latter especially due to an exchange between the two where Joe asks how old she feels she is, she says thirteen and he says me too. An earlier scene had Dottie admit to Sharla that there was a boy she knew in school that she was in love with and he with her despite never actually doing anything together, calling it true love. Since that was the only time she had been in love prior to that date, that exchange could mean that the two of them really did begin to love each other. This does hurt Chris a lot, especially after the plan turns out to be a wash and the only thing he can do now is run away and he wants to take his sister with him. She wants to go with him, yet she wants to be with Joe as well. The climax has this conflict as well as the two men are trying to get her to do what they want. There does seem to be a lot more going on with this pseudo love triangle than I can go into at the moment and I think I've gone on long enough.
Due to my lack of knowledge of the film making process, I don't think I'll get into the details of Friedkin's directing but for the most part, it is just a great film to look at. The pacing also works really nicely, expanding on a play that only had one setting. It also does make me wish that movies didn't have to do so much little things just to cut down to get the rating down. Why I'm saying this is that Killer Joe was released with an NC-17, most of the scenes that would have revisions for a future R rating release coming from the climax, and for that reason, the movie got a limited release which is quite a shame. Yet, there is something to be admired at how Friedkin really didn't feel the need to compromise his work to fit the questionable workings of the ratings system even at his age. He is a man that has his regrets, things that he didn't work on or do, yet he has no desire to follow anyone's plan but his own, only picking the kinds of movies that he wants to make, that interest him deeply. I hope that he still has some more in him and that one day, I could meet him and maybe just have a five minute talk about anything but his work just to kind of get away from the tedium he probably experiences. So, this is where I leave off this section and hopefully, the wait for the next one won't take too long and it won't be the movie that you are all expecting I'll be talking about since I already talked about it twice.
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