FRAILTY (Bill Paxton, 2002)

Reviewed: April 13th, 2002

Frailty is a very bad film with all the pieces in place to be a good one. These pieces are an interesting premise, solid acting (particularly by Matthew McConaughey), a strong visual sense (Bill Paxton shows promise in his directing debut) and excellent cinematography. Unfortunately all of these positives are for naught since the script is so damn flawed.

After The Usual Suspects it was time to retire the "Man Who Knows About a Crime Talking To/Being Interrogated By Law Enforcement Official + Flashback" conceit. It's lame. It's tired. And no one is gonna improve on the way Suspects used it (anyone remember Deceiver? Under Suspicion?... exactly). The reason the device is so attractive to filmmakers is because: (a) it makes a flashback structure manageable and relatively easy to use and (b) the potential for an unreliable narrator is a fascinating gimmick. But here's the downside: all (a) does is make a filmmaker lazy and complacent and all (b) does is (at least for the seasoned filmgoer) prepare the viewer in advance for some -- most likely conventional -- twist.

Frailty begins with McConaughey inside the Texas FBI headquarters to talk to the official in charge of the "God's Hand" serial murder case. Of course the building is improbably dark, atmospheric and vacant (only the agent McConaughey wants to talk to and his underling are around) cause that's how movies like Frailty need everything to be. McConaughey tells the agent he knows who the God's Hand killer is, thus the interview/interrogation/conversation/whatever and flashbacks begin. These flashbacks comprise the majority of the film with only an occasional obligatory jump to the present. (Paxton's time-hopping, visual transitions are weak. Why couldn't he find anything more interesting than the cliché "Camera Holds a Shot of Something, pan or tilt away, and now we're in another timeframe?")

I will not spoil what Frailty's central premise is. I will say it involves a father, his two young children, demons, the devil, God and angels. I will also reiterate that the premise, in and of itself, is compelling. There's lots of potential here.

But as Frailty crawls along at a turtle's pace, we slowly compute none of this potential will ever be realized. The film doesn't stop spinning its wheels; this is one of the most repetitive movies I've seen in quite awhile. There is a central disagreement between father and child about something the father's doing and that disagreement alone -- according to Paxton and his screenwriter's erroneous claims -- is apparently enough to justify the whole film's running time. Yes, the disagreement is creepy and the psychological ramifications on father and child are intriguing, but the film needs to eventually move past that. It never does.

Frailty is writer Brent Hanley's first produced screenplay and it shows. While I have always been a huge advocate of character over plot, Frailty has little of both. It seems the Hanley thought about his logline first, then had little clue how to flesh out his ideas. So Frailty goes nowhere, but even worse, Paxton's considerable directorial talent repeatedly manages to deceive us that eventually it will. Paxton knows how to establish a consistently spooky tone of impending dread... so we wait and wait and wait... only to be let down time and time again. I have no tolerance for a movie that asks for patience and considerable viewer time, only to end up wasting it.

The screenplay has additional problems in its limp, hackneyed dialogue. The way the father and sons speak to each other often sounds like a 1950s sitcom. And Hanley doesn't know how to efficiently develop a character; there's one scene in which -- in an effort to quickly show us how "evil" a man is -- Hanley simply has him baselessly refer to his wife as "that fucking bitch." (And I guess fearing that indeed wasn't enough, Paxton has the actor talk in a ridiculous Dirty Harry voice.)

I must also note I'm so fucking sick of movies feeling like they must provide audiences with a twist at the end. The ending of Frailty fails on every level: it supplies threadbare answers where it shouldn't, it's incredibly contrived, it's predictable and it's not the least bit engaging. The main ideas behind Frailty reminded me a lot of those which drove David Fincher's wildly influential masterpiece, Se7en. But where Se7en disturbs, Frailty comforts, typing up every loose end and leaving no room for audience interpretation. Which is scarier: knowing monsters live under your bed or constantly fearing they might?

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