Red State review

 

With the Red State tour stopping off in London we caught Kevin Smith's latest, and it's by far the best "41% Fresh" movie you're going to see this year

Many reviews of Kevin Smith's self-distributed indie movie Red State have fixated upon the director's public tirades against film critics, both during and since the poor critical response to Cop Out. This one won't, firstly because it smacks of sour grapes, but mostly because the film stands apart from its director, love him or hate him, in such a way that its background and publicity pales into insignificance.
Red State, as billed by Smith, is a horror film. I hadn't expected a drama in which people do horrific things, but that makes it scarier to me, because it's rooted in the banality of evil. Smith's career began with a study of the mundane and tangible setting of a convenience store, in 1994's Clerks, so perhaps that should have been expected. But still, there's no denying that it comes together in such a way that you would never know it was one of his.
We begin with Jarod (Kyle Gallner), Travis (Michael Angarano) and Billy-Ray (Nicholas Braun), three mid-American teenagers who head out into the woods on the promise of a ménage à quatre with a hot older woman. They wind up in the middle of Cooper's Dell, where they meet Sara (Melissa Leo) in her trailer. She gives them beer to warm up, and they guzzle it down, little realising that it's been spiked.
The three of them wake up inside the Five Points Church, a Christian fundamentalist organisation, made up of a family of gun-nuts and led by Pastor Abin Cooper (Michael Parks). Sara is his daughter, and the family are delivering what they believe is God's judgement upon homosexuals. Funnily enough, it's only at this point that the boys seem to twig that there might be a little too much sausage in that sex sandwich.
The cast credits at the end of the film divide the players up into sub-categories- “Sex”, “Religion” and “Politics”, three
things you're generally not supposed to discuss in polite conversation. In this manner, Red State is highly confrontational, but it doesn't spend too much time dwelling on that first aspect.
It actually gets down to “Religion” pretty quick, and if you hadn't surmised as much already, the Five Points Church is a thinly-veiled satire of the Westboro Baptist Church. Fred Phelps and his family are even name-checked at one point, just to hammer the point home. The Five Point-ers make for an exaggerated version of the “God Hates Fags” brigade, but we're not expected to see all of them as broadly written evil characters.
I don't want to give too much away about Red State, but it goes without saying that there's more to the film than is suggested above. Jarod and his friends aren't our protagonists. That role goes to John Goodman, as Joseph Keenan, but he arrives later in the movie, in much the same way as Marge Gunderson arrives in Fargo and then turns out to be the lead character.
It's a film that's performance-led in many ways, and Smith has admitted as much himself. It's extremely gratifying to see Goodman get a role so different from the kind we're used to seeing him play, and he brings his A-game accordingly. But it's even more surprising to see Michael Parks' performance.
It seems impossible to think that Parks hasn't been getting roles left, right and centre, after seeing his performance as Abin Cooper. Probably most recognisable as Sheriff Earl McGraw in From Dusk Til Dawn, and latterly in the Grindhouse two-fer, Parks is incredibly sinister in his portrayal of an apparently innocuous villain, utterly convinced that he is doing what is right by his God.
We see less of Parks than I'd have liked, even as the principal villain of the piece, but he makes his screen time count, even fitting in a couple of musical numbers. But the film has many characters, some of whom are seemingly incidental, and yet all contribute to the escalating circumstances of the film's main events.
Melissa Leo is a fiercely loyal daughter and imperious mother. Ralph Garman is a mute thug, who makes a big impression early on in the film. Stephen Root is a self-loathing gay sheriff. Even the three teens have far more to them than the usual dead-before-the-title-card fodder characters you might expect, thanks to the work of Gallner, Angarano and Braun.
The stand-out performance, even alongside Leo, and Parks, and Goodman, comes from Kerry Bishé, best known for Season 9 of Scrubs. She has the hardest role of any of the cast as Cheyenne Cooper, the one Five Point-er who doesn't seem beyond redemption. In due course, she seems just as thoughtless when it comes to non-believers as the rest of her stinking family, but it takes a lot to elicit sympathy in that role, and she completely succeeds.
With this cast, the film is self-assured enough that the low budget doesn't hurt it. However, there is a certain amount of compromise, particularly at the very end of the film, which continues in the same line as the script's other nods to the Coens. And whatever you can praise about Joel and Ethan Coen's scripts, it's not that they end strongly.
To some, there will be an inevitable sense of disappointment about the way Red State winds up, but there's no denying that it's the most surprising self-reinvention we've seen from a director in recent cinema history. Cooper's Dell, and what unfolds there, seems a million miles from the antics of Jay and Silent Bob.
If there's a major stumbling point, it's the fact that Smith doesn't really take a side, precisely because Christian fundamentalism is a fish-in-a-barrel topic, and to come down against the Five Point Church completely would be predictable. But combined with some uncharacteristically functional dialogue, his script sometimes seems oddly nihilistic for a film that's basically about belief.
Nevertheless, it is an extraordinarily well made film. Shot by David Klein, who made his debut on Clerks, and edited by Smith himself, it's constructed in such a way that it becomes more and more unsettling as it goes along. At 85 minutes, it moves apace, without any need for jump-scares, monsters or special effects. It's a film that puts the fear of God in you, merely by showing you awful people as they do awful things to one another.
Red Statemay not be what some people would expect, or even want, from a horror film. But it also runs counter to claims that Kevin Smith is past it. He may seem quite disillusioned with filmmaking, and his spats with the press and blogosphere may be difficult for even his most loyal fans to countenance, but here's a promise for readers of Rotten Tomatoes- Red State is by far the best “41% Fresh” movie you're going to see this year.
First and foremost, Red State is a troubling, troubled, and downright good religious horror movie. Aside from all else, it's far more interesting than the PR fiasco surrounding it. And it also just happens to prove that Kevin Smith is still capable of shocking his audience.