THE KILLER INSIDE ME
Directed by Michael Winterbottom
Produced by Chris Hanley, Bradford L. Schlei & Andrew Eaton
Written by John Curran, based on the novel by Jim Thompson
Released by IFC Films
USA. 109 min. Rated R
With Casey Affleck, Kate Hudson, Jessica Alba, Ned Beatty, Elias Koteas, Tom Bower, Simon Baker & Bill Pullman 
 

British director Michael Winterbottom, at his most uneven, strikes me as a low-rent John Huston, a capable craftsman piously turning Great Books into serviceable if basically uninteresting movies (Jude or The Claim). Maybe Winterbottom is the Classics Illustrated of modern cinema. His utility is more in pointing people to noteworthy stuff they might have missed (like Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure) and less for his actual filmmaking skills.

His latest, The Killer Inside Me, hews close to its source, pulp novelist Jim Thompson’s first-person ’50s shocker about a seemingly normal small-town West Texas deputy sheriff who’s actually a murdering sex pervert. The film, sticking so tight to the novel it practically uses it as a shooting script, captures much of the book’s sadistic charms and dim view of human nature, and it boasts a smashing soundtrack, a great period look, and a handful of decent performances. But when compared to the book, it’s like a philosopher’s zombie: all the parts are there, it’s just missing a soul.

Casey Affleck uses his boyish looks to good effect as the twisted cop Lou Ford, the apparently upright son of the county doctor who’s carrying on an affair with childhood sweetheart Amy Stanton (Kate Hudson in saucy Southern mode). Labor organizer Joe Rothman (the always great Elias Koteas) is the only one who sees Ford for what he is, and he tries to set him against Rothman’s enemy, the town’s anti-union, big-shot developer Chester Conway (Ned Beatty). But when Ford goes to issue a routine get-out-of-town notice to a local whore (or “chippy” as I guess they called ’em) named Joyce Lakeland (Jessica Alba), she awakens a sexual fetish he thought he had already done away with years ago. Murders follow.

Transitioning to the screen, the movie jettisons some of the book’s dated and sloppy psychology, but it also loses what really made Killer worthwhile—Ford’s scathing, Holden Caulfield-like observations on phoniness, and the humor that came from the way he needled people by deliberately boring them with cornpone aphorisms (“You only get out of life what you put in it,” he tells a restaurateur). Not to get too pretentious about it, but the movie somehow shows the limitations of movies. Stripped of much of its dark humor, the only brutality left in the story is the physical kind (and it’s pretty rough—Ford kills women with his fists.) Still, there are small mercies. Jessica Alba, pretty, pouty, and bland as hell, doesn’t really stick around long enough to ruin the show. Brendon Nafziger
June 18, 2010