Thursday, June 05, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Film: Pain man

Billy Bob doesn't find much Levity in Ed Solomon's debut

By Jeannette Catsoulis

Long-term felon Manual Jordan (Billy Bob Thornton) is dismayed by the possibility of freedom. "I'm happy here," he tells the parole board at the prison where he has served 22 years for killing a convenience-store clerk. They should've listened; that way, we would've been spared this excruciating traipse toward a redemption more contrived and predetermined than a Miramax press conference.

Reluctantly sprung, Manual returns to the scene of his crime with only the clothes on his back and a tattered newspaper photograph of his teenage victim, Abner Easley (played in flashbacks by Luke Robertson). An unlikely coincidence lands him a job at a local community center run by Miles Evans (Morgan Freeman), a troubled priest with a shady past of his own. In exchange for compulsory attendance at his impromptu sermons, Evans allows the patrons of the dance club across the way to use his parking lot--force-feeding God as an antidote to the drugs and booze already clogging their systems.

But Manual's real target is Adele Easley (Holly Hunter), a brisk single mother and the sister of the murdered clerk. Silently, he stalks her when she goes shopping and lurks outside her apartment, a haggard ghost hoping for forgiveness but perhaps willing to settle for sex and companionship. Gaunt and stringy-haired and sporting Thornton's trademark killer-zombie demeanor, Manual is more than a little scary. Naturally, Adele invites him up for coffee.

Levity, the opening-night film at this year's Sundance Film Festival, is in no small way the work of an ambition directly antithetical to its title. Writer-director Ed Solomon based the story on the men he encountered while working as a tutor in a maximum-security prison. "They all wanted to be redeemed in some way," he explains as the reason for his interest. But Manual's desire to make amends seems to require that everyone he meets be broken and in need of his help; so as he connects with local teens and eases himself into Adele's life, the movie's portentousness threatens to suffocate everyone involved.

With astonishing energy and no small success, the movie's stars struggle against this blanket of good intentions. Hunter and Thornton give the kind of strong, nuanced performances we expect from such seasoned performers, and Freeman adds considerable substance to a character whose background and motivations remain slippery and undefined. But it's Kirsten Dunst, playing a brittle and self-destructive party girl named Sofia, who does most to oxygenate the film; with her open, expressive face and defiant line readings, Dunst squeezes maximum import from Sofia's disintegrating and loveless home life.

Solomon, who penned the lively scripts for Men in Black and both Bill and Ted movies, is a talented writer with a knack for humor and pop-culture asides--neither of which are on display here. He seems sincerely terrified that any levity at all will distract us from the weight of Manual's quest for absolution. So intense is his commitment to this theme that it blinds him to the screenplay's most blatant contrivance: Manual's role in the gang-related problems of Adele's difficult son (Geoffrey Wigdor).

Levity is Solomon's Serious Film, his Interiors; but unlike Woody Allen, he hasn't yet inspired the kind of supportive and open-minded fan base that allows an artist to fail quite so majestically or so spectacularly.