JAYNE MANSFIELD'S CAR

JAYNE MANSFIELD'S CAR (2013)

Like "Slingblade," his celebrated feature debut as writer-director, Billy Bob Thornton's "Jayne Mansfield's Car" takes place within the South and contains a fine, primarily literary appreciation for the region and its folks. however wherever the sooner film displayed the careful design of a well-wrought novel, this new one, with its sprawling array of characters and anecdotal, bedraggled structure, feels additional sort of a assortment of reticulated short stories cobbled into AN flavoursome however ultimately unwieldy narrative.

Notwithstanding that downside, the film offers varied incidental pleasures, together with the performances of 2 grand recent lions of the screen, Robert Duvall and John Hurt. And despite its excessive length, the script (by Thornton and Jim Epperson) evidences 2 main strands: one issues the impact of war on 3 generations of men; the opposite brings a British family into the environment of a deep-dyed Southern kinship group for a show of incompatible cultures.

The latter strand offers the film the nearest factor it's to a plot. The setting: atiny low Alabama city in 1969. Jim Erskine Caldwell (Duvall), a gnarled head of household who's fascinated by ghastly automobile wrecks, has 3 grownup sons of immensely disparate personalities, likewise as a girl, however there is one thing missing within the image of his family life. That component is unconcealed one evening once a call brings news that Jim's partner his died in England. looks that decades before she wont to beg him to travel traveling together with her. once he declined, she went off to England, found a replacement life and ne'er came back. Now, her British family needs to honor her last desires by delivery her body back for burial.

Thus do the Caldwells meet the Bedfords. Kingsley Bedford (Hurt), the second husband of Jim's partner, arrives amid his 2 agreeable however rather colorless grownup youngsters, Phillip (Ray Stevenson) and Camilla (Frances O'Connor). "It's rather like 'Gone With the Wind!'" marvels one in every of the Brits once they initial see the Caldwells' rural manse. The script's inter-cultural statement rarely rises on top of that level, however principally it takes backseat to the inter-personal variations. Still wounded by his wife's abdication, Jim is at the start ugly toward his unwanted guests, however it's onerous to dislike the refined Kingsley and his well-mannered children, therefore once everybody enjoys a grounds barebque and a few frosty beverages, an explicit friendliness develops that eventually permits Jim to find why his partner left and intentional a far better life with Kingsley.

The story's other main strand involves different sorts of discoveries and touches on thematic territory that's potentially much richer. Military service had a strong impact on many Southern families in the last century, but except for a few notable films (such as the memorable Duvall-starrer "The Great Santini"), the subject has seldom been explored in the movies. Here, Jim, like Kingsley, survived the horrors of World War I, and the film gradually lets us see how his character was shaped by the experience. Two of his sons saw action in World War II that affected them in different ways. Skip (Thornton), an eccentric bachelor who dotes on his classic car collection, bears gruesome scars that seem to have given him an understandable aversion to being touched. And Carroll (Kevin Bacon) has become averse to war itself; now a stereotypical late-'60s long-haired, dope-smoking hippie, he leads protests against the Vietnam war that enrage Jim.

The question of war engages all Caldwell males, whether they've seen it or not. Skip and Carroll's brother Jimbo (Robert Patrick), a businessman, missed serving, a fact that may help explain his angry personality. Finally, Jim has two draft-age grandsons (Marshall Allman, John Patrick Amedori) who now face the dilemma of being shipped off to Vietnam or finding a way to beat the draft.

While this thematic element has inherent fascinations, the film doesn't explore them so much as it scatters them through the narrative as intriguing indicators of character. In effect, Thornton seems less interested in creating a coherent, focused comedy-drama than in fashioning a group of colorful, variegated folks and inviting us to enjoy spending time with them. Indeed, the characters are mostly likable and interesting, and the work of the film's fine cast adds to our enjoyment. It all comes to an appropriately dark and dizzy climax when Jim gets dosed with LSD by one of his grandsons and finds himself hallucinating dangerously while on a hunt with Kingsley – a scene that reminds us of the still formidable gifts of Duvall and Hurt, whose pairing here may be the one thing that guarantees "Jayne Mansfield's Car" a place in the history books.

Yet it's hard to say that this adds up to more than a smattering of ambient amusements. The film's title refers to the automobile in which movie star Jayne Mansfield was supposedly decapitated in 1967. When a nearby town has a side show displaying the vehicle, Jim takes Kingsley along to gawk at the grisly artifact. Although this Flannery O'Connor-like incident correlates with the comic morbidity that appears throughout the movie, there's no obvious reason why it deserves bequeathing the film its title. Like too much about Thornton's film, it seems random.