From Peyton Place to Invasion of the Body Snatchers to In Cold Blood, to Fargo, the small isolated American town has long been a staple of the movies — the preferred locale for immoral, criminal, downright creepy, and even otherworldly things to pop up and disgust you, creep you out, or scare your pants off.
No wonder I looked forward to seeing Cut Bank, the new film directed by Matt Shakman and written by Roberto Patino, and starring Bruce Dern and Billy Bob Thornton. It’s been running at the Criterion on Temple Street and closes tonight.
The eponymous tiny town is located in Montana near the Canadian border, and it’s instantly clear everybody wants to get out before it’s too late. With a population of only 3,000, and its signature line “the coldest town in America,” advertised on the cheesy red-hatted penguin that we encouner in the movie’s opening drive-by, Cut Bank just might prove an axiom of the genre: The smaller the town, the creeper the happenings.
As the film begins, a cheerleader named Cassandra (Teresa Palmer) and young hunk Dwayne (Liam Hemsworth) witness a murder, which they are able to video in a wildflower field at twilight.
We learn quite soon — spoiler alert! — that Dwayne has staged the killing of Georgie Wits (Dern), the local cranky mailman, to get the $100,000 reward advertised for anyone who provides leads to prosecute the killing of postal workers. That’s how much Dwayne — who’s only hanging around to take care of his dad, who’s on a respirator but really wants him dead — wants to cut out from Cut Bank.
Naturally, complications set in. The postal service is not going to cough up the reward money unless there’s a body. Georgie, who’s in on the ruse, is hiding in one of the many godforsaken basements and cellars of this film, wheezing and always in need of his inhaler.
Things go awry. At their center is the town recluse, Derby (a nicely creepy Michael Stuhlbarg). Derby spends his time doing taxidermy, include stuffing or making eerily lifelike — maybe too lifelike — people who look like the 1950s parents he remembers. He needs a parcel that was in Georgie’s truck.
His quest drives the plot as the bodies pile up, and it turns out the authorities, represented by a slow-talking Sheriff Vogel (John Malkovich) — who insists that his full name is Sheriff Vogel, no first names please — are as creepy as the miscreants.
And this brings us to the heart of darkness, the problem, with the film.
For a movie to be scary and absorbing — like the Coen Brothers’ Fargo, which appears to be the filmmakers’ template here — there needs to be a moral center, like Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson. The character can be eccentric (as McDormand so beautifully shows), but to be a foil for the lunatics, this character must be someone audience members would not mind having the proverbial beer with.
No one like that exists in Cut Bank. Everyone is creepy or arch or compromised. Dwayne, despite his John Wayne-ish good character, shows amoral creds as he regularly comes close to pulling the plug on his father’s ventilator, even before he confesses his crime. Cassandra’s main aim in life is to be chosen Miss Cut Bank, but even by small-town talent show standards, her act is dumb as all get out.
Without a moral center, Cut Bank makes a kind of cinematic farrago out of its Fargo ambitions.
Still, I enjoyed this mess. The plot is handled deftly and unexpectedly so that, by twist and turn, Dwayne and Cassandra really do get the hell out of Cut Bank, leaving those silly penguins in their dust. If the cast is wasted — Billy Bob Thornton’s existential, murderous mumbler from the truly creepy thriller Sling Blade will always be with me — it is thoroughly entertaining to see what happens to them next.
Cut Bank has its last night at the Criterion tonight.
