God in the Hands of Angry Sinners

by Justin Helmer (@justinhelmer)

Anyone who finds their mind boggled by the idea of Kevin Smith making a stark and violent film should consider that in the originally scripted (and filmed) ending of Clerks Dante is shot and killed in cold blood in the final seconds of the film. Think about that for just a second; the entire third act of the film turns on Dante finally deciding what he wants. He has made peace with all of the stupidity of his day and he finally has a plan for tomorrow. Has a plan for maybe the first time in his life--when his life is brought to a sudden violent and utterly senseless end. We haven't really seen much of that Kevin Smith in the years since, though that sensibility crept into the edges of Dogma, but he is well and truly back in his latest film Red State.

I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Red State USA screening in Minneapolis, Minnesota on March 9th. Because I am a fan of his work I have been following the development of this picture for years now and had been looking forward to seeing this movie for quite some time. I have taken the opportunity that Kevin has offered screening attendees to write a review of the film for posting in the Red State Reviewed section of www.coopersdell.com. I will do my level best to avoid any spoilers--because this is a movie that you should really experience with as little foreknowledge as possible--however, if you are the kind of person who does not want to know anything at all, consider yourself warned.

In his introduction Kevin talked briefly about the difficulties people have had in classifying this movie. He uses the label horror film but even as he said it on stage he qualified it. I would say that Red State is a moral horror movie; all of the truly terrifying things, at least for me, were moments of people who should have been, by the conventions of storytelling, protagonists making compromised moral decisions. As far as the antagonists at the center of the story, they were appalling in their utter certainty of belief in the rightness of their actions. That as much as anything else seemed to be the over-arching theme of the movie people can get up to the most awful things because of a belief; something of a variation of Dogma's theme of having a good idea being safer that having a codified (and therefore limiting) belief.

The story takes as its jumping off point the classic 'horny teens looking for sexual conquest' story and spins it off into the deep dark woods of religious fundamentalism. Smith remarked that the story concerns itself with the things America tends to obsess over: religion (as opposed to faith), sex, and violence. At the center of it all there are these two opposing forces brought to life in a pair of truly remarkable performances: John Goodman as Joseph Keenan and Michael Parks as Reverend Abin Cooper. Both actors bring a wealth of honesty to their performances that makes the most hair-pin logical turns of storytelling ring true.

Parks, in particular, plays the kind of fundamentalist abuser of religion who makes you desperately wish you could label him a movie monster and put him out of your mind. The truth is Abin Cooper is everywhere in the world that people have taken to killing in the name of whatever god they believe in. Smith was raised Catholic so he made Cooper a ruined Christian in the vein of Fred Phelps, but those nineteen men who betrayed Islam and destroyed so many lives in 2001 could have easily been cut from the same cloth. That was the most unsettling element for me personally: the utter damned plausibility of the whole thing.

One of my friends who was with me at the show remarked afterword that "Dave Klein shot the hell out of this movie." I could not say it better than that; whatever you imagine you know about the way a Kevin Smith movie looks, forget it. There is a claustrophobic closeness to all of it and at times the movie puts you in POV shots of various characters. The sustained POV reaction shot of a character as he wakes up in great peril is almost too much to bear. I felt like there were a couple of times that the sound mix went a little too heavy on the bombast, for my taste, covering up a fairly important plot point with the sounds happening around the phone conversation.

The only story issue I had was in the denouement which I felt had just a little bit too many jokey moments in it. This is an important point of summation for the characters in the film, and I was losing every other statement to laugh lines. Good jokes--or they wouldn't have gotten laughs--but there and then I was wanting to hear the conversation and I couldn't make it out.

In October Red State is going to be given a wide theatrical release; when it hits your town I suggest you go check it out. Take along two or three people who you can go out with afterward and chew over the story together. Kevin Smith has created a jet-black satire of humanity's tendency towards fundamentalism and the ways we react to it. If you were expecting Red State to be just another Smith movie you are in for a revelation of your own.