Chrystal

W/D: Ray McKinnon; with McKinnon, Billy Bob Thornton, Lisa Blount, Harry Lennix, Harry Dean Stanton

McKinnon draws leanly nuanced performances from a fine cast in this handsomely shot Southern Gothic. Opening with an elegantly underplayed police chase and deadly car crash, the film is haunted by the physical and psychological pain of choices made when one is cornered. Thornton and Blount play Joe and Chrystal, a couple bandaging their wounded trust following that tragic accident and Joe’s subsequent 16 years in prison for growing pot; the past erupts in the form of McKinnon’s Snake, a one-note sadist out to draw Joe back into a life of crime and generally torture everyone else in the movie. McKinnon has a pleasingly unfussy visual style, knows how to stage a great fistfight, and sustains an engaging tangent in which Chrystal helps a blind musicologist (Lennix) record aging mountain musician Pa Da (Stanton) – though eventually the story drags toward at least two endings too many, without quite delivering on the more vital, if subtle, tensions of its first half-hour.

Saturday, Oct. 16, 7pm at the Paramount

This article appears in October 15 • 2004.

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