![]() ![]() (A friend of mine who’s worked professionally with the retarded and who likes Sling Blade regards Karl as a fantasy about such people, not as an accurate portrayal.)ĭropped into the middle of a southern backwater populated by densely realized, fully recognizable individuals, Karl is a minimalist construction: morally and dramatically, he functions as a catalyst on this world when he’s released from the hospital shortly after the film begins. Yet the character seems to derive less from clinical studies of the criminally insane or the “mentally challenged” than from a few intuitive thoughts about simplicity as a moral concept. Defined at the outset as a simpleton and regarded by most of the other characters as retarded, at the age of 12 he murdered his mother and her young lover, then was committed to a mental hospital for 20-odd years. Strictly speaking, the world of Sling Blade is realistic - especially to an erstwhile southerner like me - but it might be argued that Karl, played by Thornton, is by far that world’s least realistic element. (Thornton’s mise en scene is mainly a matter of no-nonsense camera placement and nuanced lighting - a strictly functional approach that’s rare these days, when most scripts are too mucked up with different people’s agendas to allow a straightforward treatment.) His directing did little but arrange and highlight the insights he arrived at through writing. Though he reportedly invented the character of Karl before he ever sat down at a typewriter - by making faces in a mirror during a lunch break while performing a small role in someone else’s picture - it was his writing that made sense of the character. So it was a matter of some satisfaction to me that Billy Bob Thornton wound up getting an Oscar last month not for his lead performance in Sling Blade or for its direction but for his script. Orson Welles, habitually described as a director and actor, insisted throughout his career that he always started with the written word, not with free-floating ideas for “shots.” Erich von Stroheim and Charlie Chaplin are seldom regarded as the writers of Foolish Wives and City Lights respectively, but without their scripts neither the performances nor the films themselves would exist. In one of the unfortunate casualties of film history and criticism, writer-director-performers are generally approached as performers and/or directors first and as writers second, yet it’s often the writerly impulse that gives birth to both the performance and the direction. In this paradox lies the progress of the movies. ![]() ![]() There is no point in rendering something realistically unless it is to make it more meaningful in an abstract sense. Walsh, Natalie Canerday, Lucas Black, James Hampton, Rick Dial, and Robert Duvall. With Thornton, Dwight Yoakam, John Ritter, J.T. J.R.ĭirected and written by Billy Bob Thornton From the Chicago Reader (April 25, 1997). ![]()
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