Will any movie about the Southeast get it right? Maybe one day…but today brings reviews of two Southern thrillers (apparently both set in Texas, but Joe feels more like deep Appalachia…in1977) that have twists and are never unwatchable, but maybe aren’t as authentic or common-sense based as they should to be.
Joe…Even though the director is from the Southeast (and the co-star is the excellent Tye Sheridan from the far-superior “Mud”), “Joe” makes the same mistake so many of the films set in the Southeast do: exoticizing the rural South to the point of being bogus. This is the kind of movie where violence lurks beneath even basic interactions, a man would sell his pre-teen daughter into prostitution for ten dollars, people randomly shoot at each other with no police interference, a 15 year old is given a dangerous job with no mention ever of regulations or school or truancy laws, and a man kills a live chicken in his living room. [Even if people still did such things, why wouldn’t he at least go outside to kill the chicken? Seriously?]
And most of the supporting characters barely speak English their accents are so thick, and it’s seen as strangely commonplace for a traveling family to just move into an abandoned, dilapidated shack. I’m not saying hillbillies don’t exist, but there’s realistically showing poverty, and then there’s being so extreme with it that you actually get it wrong. Oh, and Nicolas Cage gives the only decent performance he’s given in years. I think most critics were so shocked that he was in a halfway decent movie that they just felt like giving it a pass to mix it up a little. Grade: C+
Cold in July…Michael C. Hall scores his first post-Dexter leading role as a regular family man in Texas who accidentally shoots a burglar that’s trying to break into his home. Unfortunately, the burglar happens to be the son of a recently-released murderer (Sam Shepard, who’s basically sleepwalking) who is more interested in an eye for an eye than parole technicalities. This all sounds like the standard set-up for a revenge thriller, but “Cold in July” keeps subverting your expectations at every turn, and it’s the rare film that has plot twists that actually surprised me. To say more would be to give too much away, and you don’t want to do that since the film is long on plot, but short on character development and interesting scenes. [Only Don Johnson, in a supporting turn as a cowboy private detective appears to be having any real fun.] But the movie takes on one plot twist too many and the ending sees one character shifting the target of his revenge so drastically that it doesn’t even make sense. Grade: C+