Movie Review: Frailty - Page 2

Pretty unstinting (Leonard Maltin, describing Frailty in his film guide, judges the movie as "difficult to digest – especially for a parent"), and it'd probably be even more so if the movie didn't periodically flash forward to McConaughey telling the story as Fenton. Paxton is especially chilling as the millennialist patriarch. I've always had difficulty accepting him when he plays straightforward heroes (c.f. Twister), in large part because his blunted affect is so much more appropriate for twistier characters (A Simple Plan, HBO's Big Love). In Frailty, director Paxton gets actor Paxton playing to his strengths, and the results are profoundly creepy. Laying hands on his victims to see the evil within them, he's like a manic faith healer in reverse, but the moments that have the biggest staying power are the scenes where he sits and calmly explains the rules of his holy mission to his sons. This, the audience realizes, is what true madness looks like.

Except, of course, scriptwriter Brent Hanley throws in some third act twists that, while not exactly supporting everything that Dad has told his kids at the very least takes us into paranormal territory. McConaughey's character proves to be an ultra-unreliable narrator, which Boothe's F.B.I. agent learns to his dismay. But far from being the kind of cheesy twist modern horror flicks toss out like cats scaring a nervous heroine, Frailty's work to get us questioning the comforting assumptions that most of us have used to get a grip on what we've been seeing — appearing, at one level, to endorse the Manichean madness within it while not actually doing so. A horror flick for our times, thinks I.

Article Author: Bill Sherman

Bill Sherman is a Books editor for Blogcritics. With his lovely wife Rebecca Fox, he has recently co-authored a sudsy comic fat acceptance novel entitled Measure By Measure.

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