IN Barry Gifford’s notes for the reprint of the Jim Thompson novel Cropper’s Cabin, he describes deputy Lou Ford in The Killer Inside Me as a man who bores people half to death before he actually murders them. Michael Winterbottom’s disappointing, finicky film version does its best to fulfill that vision of Ford. Cold and deeply into its own art direction, this Killer is like the adaptation Stanley Kubrick always threatened to make.
Ford (Casey Affleck) is a sheriff’s deputy in Central City, Texas, in the early 1950s: a milk-pale, mealy-mouthed doctor’s son with a cracked voice like Dennis Weaver in Touch of Evil. He has a false smile full of too-even, undersized teeth; if you couldn’t get enough of Affleck’s Judas sneer in The Assassination of Jesse James … here it is for another two hours. Seeing it, we begin to get the impression that he’s been betraying people ever since he was old enough to walk.
Ford gets into dirty business through inclination and a thirst for revenge. A crime wave starts when he’s supposed to be the one to run a hooker named Joyce (Jessica Alba) out of town, since she’s sleeping with the ne’er-do-well son of the town’s big man (Ned Beatty). What happens between Joyce and Ford unleashes the deputy’s sadism: it grows large enough to absorb his relationship with a simple good gal, Amy (Kate Hudson).
The story is red-meat stuff, but Winterbottom embalms it. He polishes up the shiniest wordplay—some of which is almost at the level of Flannery O’Connor, such as Ford’s thoughts on the victims of the world: “Nobody has it coming. That’s why no one can see it coming.”
But the faithfulness to the book also means there isn’t time in the movie to clarify the story. Like a lot of serial killers, Ford puts things out of his mind and makes things up. But the sudden introduction of new characters (particularly the flashback that gives us a Freudian explanation of how he became a sadist) keeps us confused. Faithful as it is, the movie is only half-translated from the book.
There’s so little going on here that naturally people are talking about the murders: they’re bloody, and in one case bloody and urine-soaked.
Remember that famous description of Cora in The Postman Rings Twice: “Her lips stuck out in a way that made me want to mash them back in for her”? One possible explanation for the miscasting of Jessica Alba (a girl of 2010 stuck in 1952) is that her rump sticks out like Cora’s lips. Still, Winterbottom is clear: English though he may be, he’s not indulging in the English Vice. There is to be absolutely no audience participation in the crimes.
The increasingly busy soundtrack has to do the heavy lifting. Spade Cooley’s “Shame on You,” which wraps up, doesn’t have much tension or mood. But Cooley beat and kicked his wife to death, and this might be the reason it’s included on the soundtrack. Why not? The rest of the movie has been just that didactic.
Seeing The Killer Inside Me, you have to ask: Why are we here? For the sociological merit of the story? This may be the part of Thompson that’s aged the worst; it’s one thing to write about the existence of women who like to be hurt: 1952 was so many decades before everyone with a masochistic streak and a computer blogged the world stupid about their taste for pain. It’s another thing to suppose that all it takes is one grab in the right place and a formerly furious woman is putty in your hands.
Thompson had an acute understanding of a psycho’s inner nullity, but the problem is that the rest of the town has the personality of clay pigeons. No one except Ned Beatty, on a roll this year, has the outer corruption necessary to match the inner life of this psycho.
The Killer Inside Me
R; 109 min.
Opens July 2 at Camera 3, San Jose
