A wise actor said that if you seriously want to break typecasting, you’d better create your own role. Arliss Howard, who first arrived on moviegoers’ radar screens playing a gentle-souled Marine in Full Metal Jacket and has played more than his share of gentle-souled fellas ever since, appears to have taken this advice to heart in Big Bad Love, a funny, haunting, distinctive film about Leon Barlow, an alcoholic Vietnam vet and writer living in rural Mississippi, coping with literary rejection and the emotional fallout of divorce. (Larry’s tough, sexy ex-wife is played, triumphantly, by Howard’s offscreen wife, Debra Winger.) None of these subjects yields easy comedy, and they don’t mix together in an obvious way, and putting them all together seems a doomed enterprise, like hitching a wagon to a team of wild horses, each of which wants to tear off in its own direction. But star-director Howard–who cowrote the script with brother Jim Howard from Larry Brown’s fragmented, confessional almost-novel 92 Days–holds tight to the reins, expertly guiding Big Bad Love through some magically grungy terrain.
Barlow, a housepainter and wannabe novelist, has all the hallmarks of an autodidact; he seems a self-aware artist who’s torn between wishing people would give him special treatment because of his creativity and wishing he could just blend into the world and experience it without self-consciousness. Because he’s an alcoholic, he can’t get beyond simply pondering his predicament. It’s hard to reshape your life when you can barely see straight. Like many a self-styled Southern raconteur, Barlow half-consciously dramatizes his own seedy life and plays up his Mason-Dixon machismo; he’s the hero of his own country song, and knows it. Like a blue-collar cornpone cousin of John Irving’s T.S. Garp, Barlow’s a cranky intellectual who doesn’t know how cranky he is. He starts a heated response to a New York publisher’s rejection letter with the salutation, "Dear motherfucker." When the soused Barlow pounds a guy in a bar, there’s something in his eyes that says, "I expected myself to do that–and it went pretty much as I imagined."
Howard has never been an especially vain actor, but aside from the self-regard that’s necessary to direct, write and star oneself in a movie, there’s almost no vanity in his performance as Barlow. What little there is occurs in character–within Barlow’s tangled-up personality. Scene for scene, Howard’s work is remarkable: contained and precise, but never studied; by turns affable and nasty; self-aware, but never self consciously so. Barlow’s vibe says, "Yeah, that’s right, junior, I’m as old as you think–and I can still kick your ass." Howard lets us see that Barlow, like many a Southern man, is a little fella who carries himself like a big fella. He moves like John Wayne’s kid brother, and poses without seeming like he’s posing. Although Barlow wears his hair long–either a redneck or literary affectation, maybe both–Howard has decided not to disguise his receding hairline, but to use it. Mere millimeters from disappearing over the crest of Barlow’s skull, it seems weirdly proud, backwards-ass masculine: a fortysomething man’s crackpot equivalent of a lion’s mane.
Fans of Brown, who’s so much fun to read that American lit critics tend to take his complexity for granted, will be surprised and delighted by Howard’s approach. 92 Days reads rather like a notebook–an assortment of fragments, a glimpse at the contents of one man’s rattled, booze-soaked, middle-aged-crazy mind. The movie, by virtue of being a movie, has to be more unified than that, otherwise it would lose our interest. But Howard doesn’t sew up the frayed edges of Brown’s vision. He hops between the present and the past (the mostly silent flashbacks to Barlow’s childhood are super-saturated, fragmented, lovely), but gracefully, never lingering unless there’s a sound psychological reason. The result feels compressed yet unstudied, spontaneous. Paul Ryan’s widescreen photography is capital-C Cinematic, but his embrace of natural light and environmental textures makes his imagery seem rooted, unpolished, honest. Editor Jay Rabinowitz clips the shots an instant before or after you think he should, keeping you pleasantly off-balance. The movie’s visual rhythms subtly evoke Brown’s punchy/relaxed prose style.
It’s not a perfect film: it’s too long, and it goes fuzzy sometimes. Yet Big Bad Love’s imperfections are bound up with its ambitions, and what works is so damn likable that I didn’t really mind what didn’t. It’s a pleasure and a relief to see a working-class Southern white man who looks, sounds and acts like a real guy. Howard, who hails from Missouri, plays Barlow as a self-educated man who has made a conscious decision not to leave his geographic region or his social class. This is partly due to his deep psychological attachment to the countryside and partly due to his family obligation. (He obviously still digs his ex-wife, and sometimes seems as though he wishes he didn’t; but when you hear Winger’s whisky-and-cigarettes voice, you understand his predicament.)
Like those raggedy-assed, character-driven 70s movies I can’t help loving, Big Bad Love is less interested in what happens to Larry Barlow than in what it means–to him, to his community, to the lives of his friends and family members. There are few big moments, but the small moments are so rich they feel huge–like the sequence where Barlow gets drunk with his best buddy, the affable Monroe (the marvelous Paul LeMat, whose mere presence onscreen makes me happy). As they roar along back roads late at night, Barlow spontaneously spouts out verse. He obviously digs his own words and his own voice; Monroe’s grinning from ear to ear, but his grin has nothing to do with Barlow’s words or voice, and everything to do with his love for Barlow. Big Bad Love loves life; like a good novel, it has heart, guts and soul.
Framed
I’m not a fan of indie filmmaker Larry Fessenden, whose films often seem like exploitation pictures pretending to be downtown art flicks, or vice versa, without ever making up their minds to fall definitively in one camp or the other. Wendigo, a creepy thriller about a New York yuppie family on an upstate vacation-gone-bad, doesn’t clarify Fessenden’s vision (or make it easier for guys like me to label him), but it’s a quantum leap forward in terms of technique. It keeps you off-kilter from the moment the family’s car hits a deer, robbing rifle-toting locals of their ceremonial killshot. After that, it wavers, Shining-style, between folklore, ghost story and telepathic scare-job, as tensions within the family are mirrored, and perhaps enhanced, by the unfamiliarity of their rural surroundings. The central performances–Patricia Clarkson’s mom, Jake Weber’s dad, Erik Per Sullivan’s pint-sized freaked-out son–are excellent. But Fessenden’s story meanders as he rummages through various grab-bags of horror traditions, never settling on one (or even two) sources. The film’s first act is forbiddingly powerful, a jagged edifice of pure fear; but over the next 80 minutes, those feelings dissipate like so much powdery snow.
