As I write this review, I’m about to visit my family to celebrate Yom Kippur. It is the Jewish holiday associated with atonement and reflecting on the human condition… and “Sling Blade,” though it does not directly deal with Jewish culture, confronts the moral ideas behind this holiday as effectively as any drama ever captured on celluloid.
“Sling Blade” is a movie about judging people by their hearts and souls. This is easier said than done, given the labels we place on people when they belong to marginalized groups or if they have made mistakes in their past. Because human beings can’t seem to learn these basic moral lessons, tales like the one told in “Sling Blade” resonate quite powerfully. They don’t preach their message of compassion; they simply create realistic characters, drop them into realistic situations and force us to watch as events play out to their logical conclusion.
The film opens with a mentally disabled Arkansas man named Karl Childers (Billy Bob Thornton, who also directed and wrote the film) listening with quiet dismay as a fellow inmate at the psychiatric hospital where he lives subjects him to a hateful, bigoted rant.
Spoiler alert: By the end of the movie he is once again conversing with the character (played by J. T. Walsh), but this time has learned enough by the events in the film’s plot to tell him to piss off. Those two moments anchor the film, letting us know that this is a story about not just the fact that there is a difference between right and wrong, but the importance of knowing what to do with that knowledge.
In between those two scenes, however, we have the parable that makes up the bulk of the movie’s running time. Karl is being released from the hospital because “that’s the rules,” indicating that his release is less due to compassion or a genuine belief in his rehabilitation than rote bureaucratic protocol. Thornton brilliantly establishes everything we need to know about his character in his opening monologue, using what could have been generic exposition as a window into a wounded human soul: He is mentally handicapped, was rejected and mistreated by his family, was bullied at school and was exploited by the man who employed him. He was institutionalized at the age of 12 after he used the titular sling blade to murder a man he thought was raping his mother. Upon learning that his mother was actually having an affair, Karl killed her as well. He chillingly says that he would do the same thing again if he could, but reconciles that with what he has read in the Bible. In one scene, carried entirely by Thornton’s directing, writing, and acting, we feel we know this man intimately and sense that he has a good soul, but also intuit that he still has the ability to kill again. At one point Karl ominously answers a question about whether he could commit another murder by simply saying that he “reckons he has no reason” to do so… which, notably, is not the same thing as saying no.
Karl is released from the hospital, of course, and moves into his Arkansas hometown where a sympathetic doctor helps him get a job at a repair shop. While struggling with poverty and adjusting to society, he befriends a 12-year-old boy named Frank Wheatley (Lucas Black), whose father committed suicide and whose mother Linda (Natalie Canerday) is now in a relationship with an abusive alcoholic, Doyle Hargraves (Dwight Yoakam). Karl learns to develop genuine human contact — that rare and special form of intimacy known as friendship — through his relationships with this dysfunctional family, as well as with a homosexual man named Vaughan Cunningham (John Ritter) who manages the dollar store where Linda works and viscerally empathizes with Karl’s outsider status.
In a lesser movie, these characters would be cardboard cutouts to be moved around in the service of the plot. Because Thornton can enter the skins of all of the people who populate this universe — from Karl himself and the little boy Frank to the vulnerable Vaughan, despicable Doyle and the open-minded repair shop owner who tries his best to give Karl a second chance — this instead feels like a slice of life. We don’t feel like we’re being told a story, but secretly witnessing the hard experiences of those who so many of us prefer to overlook.
The movie climaxes in a scene that is at once predictable, even inevitable, but nonetheless unfolds in an atmosphere of tense horror. It is the moment when Karl’s Biblical sense of morality dictates his actions, even as he learns that certain aspects of the Bible should be disregarded so that the more important parts can be obeyed. If there is social commentary here — beyond the movie’s progressive attitudes toward economic inequality, mistreatment of the mentally ill and the plight of the LGBT community — it is that we often select the worst aspects of our self-proclaimed moral codes as the ones to be followed, and the most noble ones to be ignored as “weak” and “for pussies.”
Yet, once again, I don’t want to make this seem like a preachy tale. It is a full blooded story, rich in the best and worst of elements of the human condition, and one of the most satisfying cinematic experiences I’ve ever had.