Frailty (2001)

March 26, 2004

by Nathan Shumate

Directed by Bill Paxton
Written by Brent Hanley
Starring
- Bill Paxton
- Matthew McConaughey
- Powers Boothe
- Matt O’Leary
- Jeremy Sumpter

How often do you see a movie about a subject that truly frightens you?

I’m not talking about ickies like spiders or snakes or brain-eating worms. And I’m not talking about spookies like mist-shrouded graveyards or ghostly apparitions. These are the boogah-boogah things that would certainly make us nervous if we encountered them face-to-face, but they’re not the ideas that can deeply disturb us. What frightens you so much that you hate to think of it? Death? Betrayal? Alzheimer’s? Nuclear conflict? Each of us have some fears that are so frightening that even considering their possibility makes us quake in some deep dark part of the soul.

A cautionary tale: This is what eating too many peas can do to you.

One of mine, and I think I share this one with every thoughtful person of faith, is the idea of religious devotion gone wrong. I don’t mean your standard-issue evil cult; that’s just another boogah-boogah entry. I’m talking about a heartfelt religious conviction which defines your nature and place in the cosmos and your relation to deity — the most fundamental principles on which we base our worldview, our self-image, our behavior, and our conceptions of right and wrong. What if… it’s all wrong? Because, you see, any person of faith is ultimately basing such convictions on evidence that cannot be quantified (in other words, “the evidence of things not seen,” Paul’s definition of faith). Which means, no matter how strong the faith, there is room for a smidgen of doubt thanks to the faith that the object of faith isn’t sitting on your living room sofa on a regular basis, concretely demonstrating that your conclusions are dead-on.

Writer Brent Hanley and director/star Bill Paxton have given us here a meditation on religious inspiration that fulfills all of the hallmarks of the real thing — and yet cannot, must not, be real. It’s a tension that pervades the movie and makes it nigh impossible for any person of faith to walk away with an unwrinkled brow.

Now available as an attractive boxed gift set.

The story is told largely in flashback (and, truth be told, flashback within flashback), to Agent Doyle (Powers Boothe), FBI agent in charge of the Texas “God’s Hand Killer” slayings. The tale teller identifies himself as smalltowner Fenton Meiks (Matthew McConaughey), and asserts that his brother Adam is the God’s Hand Killer. Cue harp runs for the long explanation.

The year is 1979, and Bill Paxton is a single father raising barely-adolescent Fenton (Matt O’Leary) and pre-pubescent Adam (Jeremy Sumpter). Dad is a salt-of-the-earth mechanic, a genuinely good man with no visible religiosity. It comes as something of a shock, then, when he wakes the boys in the middle of the night to tell them that he’s just had a vision: An angel has just appeared to him, and he and his family have been given the mission to slay demons walking among them in human form, as directed by heaven.

Adam takes Dad immediately at his word, revelling in the superheroic aspects of their calling. Just as immediately, Fenton rejects the possibility, tries to convince himself that this midnight declaration was just a dream — and when that proves impossible, labors to find a way to stop his father from fulfilling a mission he’s dedicated himself to. Further revelations follow: Special holy weapons are pointed out to Dad, which look for all the world like a double-edged axe, a pair of work gloves, and a length of metal pipe. And following that, a list of names: The demons that the Meiks family is to track, capture, bring home, and destroy, burying their bodies in the municipal rose garden next to their house.

“Be honest — does this breastplate make me look fat?”

Fenton is powerless to stop Dad as he brings home the first on the list, duct-taped and mascara-streaked. Dad claims that, when he touches her without the protection of the holy gloves, he can see visions of her horrific evil — and Adam chimes in that he can see them too. Only Fenton sees unvarnished, mundane reality as his father takes the axe and decapitates her, without a moment’s regret or squeamishness. And yet, as the movie carefully shows us, this is not a man descending into fanaticism and madness; he’s not a frothing zealot. He’s a good and loving and humble father, who just happens to believe that he can see and slay demons.

What gives the movie its power is its excruciating ambiguity. Fenton is convinced from Day One that Dad’s delusional — but yet, for us the viewers, the entire scenario is disturbingly plausible. Hanley’s script follows the pattern set down in authentic apocalyptic literature in scripture, Jewish pseudepigrapha and Christian apocrypha: a good and honorable man, chosen by Heaven with a mission that will make him a pariah. It’s a scenario believers accept without batting an eye when seen in holy writ, because it’s told from a viewpoint of certainty about the veracity of the inspired man’s claims; can we dismiss it out of hand simply because the pattern is being repeated in Thurman, Texas in 1979?

And who of us, as genre media fans, haven’t seen movies or read books in which the heroes are the only ones able to fight a fantastic deadly threat which is invisible to the world at large? If you’ve seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers or They Live or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you have. The difference is, in those instances, you know going in that the threat is real, and the naysayer characters saying, “That’s insane!” just haven’t seen the truth yet. But what if the naysayer’s right? (Truth to tell, on my list of “screenplays to write someday when I get around to it,” I’ve had a concept which is pretty similar to Frailty, but told from that position of certainty. I’ve now crossed it off my list.)

After all this, plus the excellent acting by Paxton, McConaughey, and especially Matt O’Leary (called upon to carry much of the movie), I was fully prepared to award Frailty a “HOT” rating for cinematic excellence.

So THAT’S what Rumsfeld wanted the duct tape for.

Then the last fifteen minutes came along and screwed it all up.

There are at least two major problems in the third act, and I don’t think there’s any way to talk about at least one of them without spoilers. So if you’ve seen the movie (or don’t care about spoilers), highlight the following paragraph; otherwise, skip ahead to the second objection, which I’ll try to relay without giving too much away.

The abrupt change in the identity of the narrator — when we find out that it’s actually Adam, not Fenton, we’ve been hearing from — was probably intended to be a rugpull like that of The Sixth Sense or Fight Club, when one new piece of information makes the viewer re-evaluate everything he’s seen and thinks he understands. But it doesn’t work like that. Instead, it makes the storytelling unreliable, and not in the sense of The Usual Suspects; when you realize that Adam has been telling us a story in relentlessly faithless Fenton’s voice, telling it in such a way that we’re not supposed to believe, it upsets the purpose of the story altogether. Why would true believer Adam tell the story with such dedication to relaying Fenton’s doubts and frustrations, which young Adam largely didn’t comprehend at the time? Why spend so much time making Fenton’s account sympathetic, when it falls from the lips of the brother who believes what the angel told Dad — that Fenton himself is a demon? This isn’t a clever headspin, though it means to be; it’s jarring, and it almost sinks the movie and undoes all of the storytelling goodwill to that point. It is, in a word, cheating.

“You want adolescent angst? I’ll GIVE you adolescent angst!”

The second big problem is that the climax sacrifices that carefully-built ambiguity. A much more powerful ending would have sustained it, even while resolving the story of the characters involved. The only example of the right way to do it is Flatliners, as much as it pains me to write a word in praise of a Joel Schumacher film. Much of that movie revolved around the question of whether the characters’ near-death experiences were true visions from beyond, or simply a bubbling-up of deep-seated guilt as their brains underwent extreme oxygen deprivation. Yet that script managed to bring the characters’ story to a cathartic conclusion while leaving that ambiguity open. The tension of the larger question — can apocalyptic inspiration be true in our “real” world? — is negated in the name of a “comfy” resolution. It’s a question much larger than a single movie, and ends up trivialized by a pat answer.

In many ways, Frailty is the 21st-century version of God Told Me To — a better movie in most ways, but with a similarly weak ending. It appears that when filmmakers approach this kind of powerful religious ambiguity, even they can’t resist taking upon themselves the role of clergy and explaining What It All Means.