Author Larry McMurtry once dismissed his novel The Last Picture Show as a ?vindictive little thing? about his hometown of Archer City, TX. Pulitzer Price-winning playwright Tracy Letts? Killer Joe might also be seen in the same way, a malicious and barbed little play with a vicious sense of humor aimed squarely at Dallas, TX. Letts lived in Dallas for a spell, working as a telemarketer, and he took his baby steps on the boards at Southern Methodist University before high-tailing it to Chicago. And from Killer Joe, Letts? first play, we can only assume the Oklahoma native was happy to get the hell out of town.
Killer Joe?s world offers a decidedly dressed-down vision of Dallas, set in a scuffed-up reimagining of the sun-baked lots and muffler shops off rough-and-tumble Harry Hines. (Highland Park Village is nowhere in sight.) And in director William Friedkin?s film adaptation of Letts? play, Dallas is just a spot on the map of a more generic vision of Texas (shot, incidentally, in New Orleans), where Dallas Police Department detectives sport black-brimmed cowboy hats and the common folk burn tuna casserole in their trailer homes? electric ovens. Killer Joe is a Texas-gothic pulp thriller, wild, bawdy, and bloody. It is populated with half-brained numbskulls and mean alpha males, all so crudely rendered we can?t help but see them as caricatures or types (or animals). The lot of Killer Joe?s characters is caught in a tumble of base desires, where the only thing sweeter than a little cash is the opportunity to act on sadistic sexual eccentricities.
Matthew McConaughey plays Joe, the cowboy hat-sporting Dallas Police detective with impeccable manners, McConaughey?s trademark sleazy drawl, and a taste for blood and women. He?s also a killer for hire who is approached by the bumbling Chris Smith (Emile Hirsch), a young-and-cocked ignoramus who has buried himself in a financial bind after screwing up a stint as a hapless cocaine dealer. Chris hatches a plan to have his mother wacked by Killer Joe so that he can collect $50 thousand of life insurance money and pay off his debtors. The only rub is the beneficiary of the insurance policy is Chris? sister, Dottie (Juno Temple), a nymph-ish half-there teenager who is in the custody of Chris? father, Ansel (Thomas Haden Church). Ansel has since remarried Sharla (Gina Gershon), a foul-mouthed harlot who rules Ansel?s roost (a dinged-up trailer home), while two-timing him with a mysterious man. Everyone needs to be in?cahoots?to make the scheme work, and it doesn?t take long to figure out that the murder-for-hire plot will prove a little too tricky for these sorry souls.
The first time we meet Sharla, in the movie?s first scene, Chris opens the door to the trailer home and almost walks face into the older woman?s exposed privates. The scene sets the tone of the kind of sense of humor that infects Killer Joe, a body slapstick built on sex and scars. Killer Joe is a devilishly black comedy, and its jokes work like alchemy on all the grime and gristle, turning the heinous into humor. It?s all so wry and wicked part of the joke becomes the question of how we can find all this depravity so funny.
Chris tries to hire Joe, but without any up-front cash, Joe requests as a retainer, namely, Dottie, the little virgin vixen he met when he arrived early for his first meeting with the Smith family. Chris begrudgingly obliges, which sets up Killer Joe?s second most memorable scene, in which Dottie serves Joe the tuna casserole before the older man makes her undress in front of him, taking the shaking girl while the two tell each other they are both twelve-years-old. The scene touches upon many of the elements that seem to make Killer Joe tick: a slicing through a thin veneer of feigned familial fa?ades; the simmering tension of almost-violence; the unspoken presumption that a plethora of nasty secrets ? abuse, cruelty ? are all at play regardless of whether they are spoken about. But what is remarkable is that Friedkin and Letts manage to make this disturbing scene, like others, beat with humor and strike a few surprising notes of tenderness. Given the film?s tone, it feels entirely appropriate that Joe and Dottie prove the most manic ? and most appealing ? of the movie?s characters.
For a movie about a killer, the murder in Killer Joe is an after thought. Instead the movie builds the tension between Joe and his temporary employers, building our anticipation of the arrangement?s eventual explosive unraveling. When it does, Friedkin serves a high intensity and disgusting sequence that is pure unleashed id (complete with repurposed fried chicken), Joe spinning like an unleashed dervish; the pleasure of inflicting pain seems payment enough. Here we cling toThomas Haden Church?s adorably ham-performance as the slack-jawed Ansel, helpless and hopeless, his boyish cowardice offering comedic reprieve from the raw violence unleashed by McConaughey?s Joe.
It?s Joe that gives the film its real punch. McConaughey has found another role this year that challenges our expectations of an actor whom we long assumed painted himself in a rom-com corner. McConaughey has a knack for matching manners with a maniacal brutality, a slithering sexuality with a sick sadistic appetite. Killer Joe whips all this weirdness into something surprisingly enjoyable, if revolting cynical. But what makes Killer Joe work ? its exaggeration of our worst selves ? is also its undoing, its characters too boiled down to resonate much beyond the uneasy, tapering chuckles forced by its sick sense of humor.?Letts may be taking apart what he sees as the eccentric ignorance that underpins Texan bravado and ambition, but what we?re really left with is the particulars of his vivid imagination for the perverse. The only thing Killer Joe really makes you rethink is the thought of ever eating fried chicken again.
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