Translating a novel’s first-person narrative to the screen
is a tricky task Michael Winterbottom isn’t up to with The Killer Inside Me. Based on Jim Thompson’s 1952 pulp classic
about a small-town West Texas deputy sheriff named Lou Ford (Casey Affleck)
with a penchant for cold-blooded brutality, Winterbottom’s adaptation does its
best to approximate the perspective of its source material, sticking closely to
Lou throughout and embellishing his story with the character’s inner-musing
narration. Both of these prove reasonable methods of duplicating the psycho’s
POV, yet unlike Thompson’s tome, which was wholly steeped in Lou’s twisted
headspace, Winterbottom’s film radiates none of the chilly amorality and warped
passions and compulsions of its lunatic cop. Shot with a stylishness that’s far
too clean, professional and static for material that craves an atmosphere of
hothouse viciousness barely suppressed beneath a veneer of cordial civility,
it’s a saga that’s skillful but aloof, unable to truly burrow into and reflect
its protagonist’s psychosexual madness.
Employing blooming whites that suggest the ominous negative
space inside Lou, and frequently cutting to flashbacks in ways that are
proficient but lack a sense of memory as the root cause of feverish compulsion,
Winterbottom stewards The Killer Inside
Me with a detachment at odds with his tale’s fixation on Lou’s interior
state. Lou’s reign of terror is instigated by an assignment to run local
prostitute Joyce (Jessica Alba, a bit too nice-girl sexy for the role) out of
town. It’s a mission he quickly warps to his own vengeful ends, embarking on an
S&M-tinged affair with Joyce – replete with belt-whippings that mirror
childhood bedroom experiences – while simultaneously helping set up a blackmail
scheme involving Elmer (Jay R. Ferguson), the son of local business magnate
Chester Conway (Ned Beatty). Elmer is in love with Joyce, and Lou agrees to
help facilitate a payoff from Chester to Joyce so she’ll leave town, cash that
Lou and Joyce plan to enjoy after secretly running off together. Or so Lou
says, right up until the moment – motivated by homicidal urges, and a desire to
punish Chester for killing his brother years earlier – that he pounds Joyce’s
face into a bloody pulp and then guns down Elmer, an act of fist-pounding
murder that, staged with prolonged bluntness, conveys the outwardly genial
character’s rampaging psychosis.
Aside from a later, similar instance of horrifying physical
punishment, however, The Killer Inside Me
never gets close enough to Lou to truly capture a sense of his sadistic sex-and-violence
impulses. Winterbottom’s calm, composed direction is the primary culprit for
this shortcoming, but Affleck’s performance also shoulders some blame, the
actor’s glassy-eyed remoteness rarely implying the torment that Lou describes
as being stuck with one foot planted on either side of the fence, and “all I
can do is wait until I split, right down the middle.” Though Affleck nails the
few moments in which Lou exposes his true self through quick, devious smiles,
his performance is too superficial to consistently sell the man’s fractious
duality. A superb supporting cast (including Elias Koteas as a labor union
bigwig on to Lou’s lethal scheming, Tom Bower as Lou’s loyal boozehound sheriff
boss, and Beatty as the town’s construction industrialist) provides the right
type of oil-slick slimy color that such a dirt-and-grime crime story craves.
Yet compounding Affleck’s disingenuous turn is Kate Hudson, who, as Lou’s loyal
girlfriend Amy, communicates devotion and decency with excessive affectation,
her bedroom come-ons and emotional distress devoid of authenticity. Like the
film as a whole, she strikes poses rather than expresses true, roiling emotion.
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