FRAILTY

By: JEFF BOND
Review Date: Friday, April 12, 2002

Ever since THE SIXTH SENSE, makers of American suspense thrillers have gotten so obsessed with plot twists, turns and trick endings that audiences have almost gotten used to enduring an hour or so of unintelligible plotting before they're handed a denouement that makes a confusing movie finally make sense. It was satisfying the first few times, but it's reached the point where I'd like to just have a plot that grabs me from the word go.

Bill Paxton's FRAILTY tries to deliver on both the Compelling Plot and Mind-Blowing Reveal front, and while it doesn't completely succeed in the latter case, I'm more than willing to forgive that because 90 percent of the movie is just that a movie as opposed to a gimmick.

FRAILTY opens in the manner of many a serial killer movie, with ominous music and grainy black and white images that all look like someone's Last Known Photo. A sweaty Matthew McConaughey (in the first decent use of this actor I've seen in a while) strolls into an FBI office and informs a skeptical agent (Powers Boothe) that he knows the identity of the notorious "God's Hands" serial killer that has been terrorizing the countryside. The man claims that the murderer is in fact his brother, and when the suspicious FBI agent demands an explanation, the film flashes back to the childhood of the man, Fenton Meiks (played as a child by Matthew O'Leary), and his brother Adam (Jeremy Sumpter).

Set in the early '70s, the flashback quickly establishes the boys as the sons of a single dad (director and actor Bill Paxton), seemingly doing a decent job of raising them in their small town. Adam, the younger boy, is a kind of budding Tod Flanders (he even sings the Flanders boys' favorite song, "I've Got Joy Joy Joy Joy Down In My Heart") who's just crazy about Jesus and the church. Fenton is older and no longer believes in Santa Claus or the "make believe" of religion. Dad's stance on the subject isn't in question until one summer night when he enters the boys' room, wakes them up and informs them that he has just been visited by an angel warning of the impending Rapture. Seems Dad has specific instructions from the angel to begin seeking out and destroying demons disguised as human beings on Earth demons that only Dad will be able to see.


Adam accepts Dad's new mission without question, while Fenton just hopes the whole thing was a bad dream that his father will forget. And the next day everything seems back to normal... until Dad brings in an ax and tells the boys that this is the weapon they'll be employing in their new and holy battle against evil. So begins a primal conflict between faith and familial loyalty that should have particular (if painful) relevance as we go through this whole Catholic Church child molestation debacle and a paroxysm in the Middle East that pits faith against faith.



Like Michael Tolkin's THE RAPTURE, FRAILTY confronts the basic questions of Fundamentalism, i.e., if you believe in God's Word, what do you do when he seemingly orders you to kill? In the (recent) history of serial killer movies, I don't think there's been a movie like FRAILTY. Most movie serial killers not only don't seem to have families, they seem specifically beyond family, divorced from human desires for closeness and intimacy. This makes them easy, painless targets for our own knee-jerk desires for movie vengeance and justice. Movie serial killers are just monsters with no past and no human connections that might be damaged either by their actions or their ultimate destruction.

FRAILTY doesn't allow the audience that easy safety valve. Once the film's flashback is set into motion, we're put in the middle of a seemingly decent family being eaten from inside by madness. At the core is the horribly conflicted character of Fenton, whose first instincts are to protect his young brother, whom he believes is too young to truly understand what's happening to their father. But as the story unfolds it becomes clear that Adam's loyalty is to his father and God, and Fenton is quickly placed in the role of the betrayer in the eyes of both. Fenton's protective instincts are too strong to allow him to leave his brother behind and strike out on his own, so he is set as a desperate voice of reason that neither Adam nor his father can accept.

And the boys' father does indeed begin to seek out the victims of God's retribution, and with the boys as witnesses and accomplices, he begins to kill.

FRAILTY's basic setup is riveting, and with Paxton's measured direction (which trusts the story at every step of the way) and two extremely convincing performances from the two child leads, the film plays out like a cross between TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and PSYCHO. As the tortured Fenton, young Matthew O'Leary even looks remarkably like Phillip Alford's Jem Finch in MOCKINGBIRD.

Paxton's role is the tough one: it takes a genius to mouth the fulminations of the Lord without sounding awfully silly. To his credit, Paxton largely underplays and he establishes such a believable low-key dad early on that the introductory scenes of his madness have a chilling power to them. Cinematographer Bill Butler (JAWS) contributes some of the best work of a stellar career in his collaboration with Paxton, drenching scenes with an eerie, heavenly light that gives us at least a glimpse into Dad's seemingly deluded mind.

If the movie falters, it does so in a denouement that attempts to pull the old switcheroo one too many times. After spending so much time with the riveting tale of the boys and their father, their ultimate fates in the present don't have quite the impact the screenwriter might have intended, and despite the ending's multiple reveals there are a few loose ends left untied (although reportedly a lengthier cut on the DVD may remedy that problem).

Still, for the bulk of its running time FRAILTY is as gripping a suspense tale and morality play as I've seen in years. It may be too old-fashioned for some and too emotionally bruising for those sensitive to movie portrayals of the American family, but Paxton (in his directorial debut) shows a firm hand and proves once again that psychological horror blows away any amount of bloody hacking and chopping you can put onscreen.