Saturday, September 8, 2012

Movies: Killer Joe

Killer Joe, directed by William Friedkin, written by Tracy Letts and starring Matthew McConaughey and Emile Hirsch, is kind of like a train wreck.  You can't stop watching it, no matter how hard your stomach is turning. 

It's about the Smiths, a family who live in a trailer park in the Dallas area, and who are dumber than a box of rocks.  The film opens with Chris Smith (Emile Hirsch), pounding on the door of his father's trailer on a rainy night, screaming for his sister, Dottie (Juno Temple) to let him in.  Eventually, the door is opened by his step mother, Sharla (Gina Gershon).  Chris urgently pulls his father, Ansel (Thomas Hayden Church) outside to tell him about an idea he has to get the family $50,000: he wants to have his mother (Ansel's first wife) killed and collect on her life insurance policy.  As Chris puts it, he would then be able to pay off some drug dealers to whom he owes a large sum of money, and the family's financial problems would be solved.  To most people, this would obviously be out of the question.  But the Smiths are not most people, and Chris gets the whole family on board.  To carry out the plan, they reach out to Killer Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a policeman who sometimes moonlights as a contract killer.  When the plan inevitably goes wrong, things go south, fast, for everyone involved.  

The cast is flawless.  Even Matthew McConaughey, who I usually want to punch in the face.  This is by far the best performance I have ever seen from him.  There is something ominous that lurks below Joe's calm exterior, and it is impossible to look away when that exterior is broken.  Juno Temple's Dottie is a perfect, sweet, dumb white trash angel, complete with a halo of blonde hair.  As Chris, Emile Hirsch is a lovable idiot.  For the most part, his heart is in the right place, especially where his sister is concerned.  But his head fails him, and he gets himself, and sometimes the people around him, in trouble.  

Friedkin takes these characters and places them in a dark and dangerous world where anything can happen, and usually does.  Add to that the strength of the writing and cinematography, and you have an unforgettable filmgoing experience.