Killer Joe

Killer Joe – A surprising late work by director William Friedkin, Killer Joe (2012) adapts a southern Gothic play by Tracy Letts to the screen.  The plot is a hillbilly variation on Double Indemnity:  a Texas ne’er-do-well is in trouble with loan sharks and so he conspires with his father, step-mother, and spooky little sister to murder his mother.  A Dallas detective who moonlights as a contract killer, the eponymous Joe, is retained to do the evil deed.  Since the ne-er-do-well doesn’t have sufficient funds to engage the murderer, he lets the assassin have his semi-retarded sister as “a retainer.”  As it happens, the ne-er-do-well son’s sluttish stepmother is sleeping with the doomed mother’s current husband and knows that the beneficiary on the life insurance policy has been changed to require that proceeds be paid to her boyfriend.  The murder is accomplished but the money is diverted to the dead woman’s husband, the killer-cop claims the girl as his collateral on the transaction, and, then, everyone kills everyone else.   Letts’ script is sordid but has a few good one-liners and the action is amusing and comical in a macabre sort of way.  There’s not much to the situation and the characters are all half-wits and tramps to the extent that Matthew McConnaughy’s contract killer, well-mannered and soft-spoken in the menacing manner of early Clint Eastwood stands out as the pinnacle of success and accomplishment among these yokels.  The performances are ripely effective and there’s lots of blunt nudity and gore.  The denouement is predictable, the scary little sister who has a propensity for sleepwalking and imitating Kung Fu movies turns out of be the Clytemnestra of the clan, something that you can see coming from a mile away.  Letts thinks that he’s making a modern analog to the House of Atreus and the nightmarish family dinner that precedes the climactic bloodbath – everyone chows down on KFC original recipe chicken – is grimly comical.  The problem with Letts’ script is implicit in my comparison of this trailer court tragedy to Aeschylus and Sophocles – Letts believes this material is transgressive and cutting edge and plays everything for the maximum in shock-value but, in fact, the material was timeworn when the furies stalked the Mycenaean Royal Court.  Friedkin doesn’t take the script that seriously.  The film is cheaply and digitally made and looks like a video-taped Mexican soap opera as directed by Douglas Sirk – there are lots of anguished close-ups and the trailer house that serves as the principal set is layered with unnatural zones of blue and flamingo-pink light.  A gothic thunderstorm replete with lightning flashes is perpetually underway and rain pelts the muddy lots of the trailer houses and a dog is always snarling and barking in the downpour.  Friedkin makes a few half-hearted efforts to open up the stage-play, contriving, for instance, a pointless chase through the industrial barrens of the Dallas – the picture was actually shot in New Orleans – but, by and large, he keeps the action confined to the miserable trailer house’s kitchen.  The actors, particularly McConnaughy, who gives a coiled rattlesnake performance, seem to be enjoying themselves.  In the opening sequence, the son beats on the windows and walls of his dad’s trailer house until the door is answered by his stepmother (Gina Gershon), nude from the waist down.  “What do you come to the door like that?” the stepson cries out.  Gershon replies:  “I didn’t know it was you.  I thought it was just some stranger.”