Freeway.

Where do you start blogging a film like Freeway (1996) Matthew Bright's first outing as writer and director? Perhaps by telling you it’s a sordid over the top tale of woe based on the European folk tale Little Red Riding Hood or better still starting by describing the brilliant early lead performance of Reese Witherspoon as Vanessa Lust, the poor, illiterate underage teenage daughter of a Los Angeles drug addicted prostitute who is sexually abused by her step father and who encounters a serial killer on the way to live with her grandmother in Stockton – a performance that won her a Best Actress Award. Then there were the movie censorship problems due to graphic language and violent content, cut to enable a NC-17 rating when released in the USA.

When both of her parents get arrested, Vanessa steals the car of her family-services caseworker and heads up the Freeway to live with her paternal grandmother who she has never met. When the cars engine blows it force her to accept a ride from charming and sympathetic Bob Wolverton who tells her he is a youth counsellor. During the journey Vanessa finds herself confessing the sordidly sexual details of her childhood but its not long before Vanessa realises the true identity of her driver - just before he attacks her and declares his intention to murder her and have sex with her corpse! He turns out to have been slaughtering young prostitutes in the Los Angeles area.  Thanks to a gun borrowed from her fiancé, Vanessa turns the tables on Bob, shooting him repeatedly and leaving him for dead. Of course it’s not long before the Police catch up with our teenager and she ends up in court. But this is only the beginning of a spiral of depravity for Vanessa.

 

Nice wheels.

It also stars some other well-known actors including Kiefer Sutherland as serial killer Bob Wolverton, Dan Hedaya as Detective Garnet Wallace; the brilliant Honey Bunny from Pulp Fiction (1994) Amanda Plummer as Vanessa’s mum from hell Ramona, with the tragic Brittany Murphy playing Rhonda, Vanessa’s heroin addicted lesbian friend. This 1996 exploitation/grindhouse movie is exceptionally good mainly due to that award winning performance from Reese Witherspoon and did manage to garner some very good reviews and is better than its straight to video sequel Freeway 2 Confessions of a Trickbaby (1999)  

Devils Knot.

Although based on a true story, Canadian stage and film director Atom Egoyan’s movie Devils Knot (2013) is the rather un-compelling retelling of a incident involving the murder of three eight year old boys in Arkansas in 1993.  The suspects, who became known as the West Memphis Three, were charged and convicted of the killings. Damien Echols was sentenced to death, with the other two, Jessie Misskelley Jnr and Jason Baldwin, sentenced to life imprisonment. Did they carry out the crime or was it a miscarriage of justice?  The film stars a wooden Colin Firth as Ron Lax, an investigator who assists the defence team pro bono because of; the film informs us, his objection to capital punishment and Reese Witherspoon as Pamela Hobbs, mother of one of the young victims.

 

West Memphis Three.

The actual 'Three'.

The problem with this movie is it lacks any element of surprise and turns out to be a plodding retelling of a well known story already covered by Mara Leveritts book, on which the movie is allegedly based, Devil’s Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three, published in 2002 but also there is the three part documentary by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky which is said to be far superior. Which raises the question why bother?

Mud

Matthew McConaughey is an actor that improves with every new film. I felt that in The Lincoln Lawyer (2011) his portrayal of defence lawyer Mickey Haller gave him a chance to leave his lightweight roles behind and to be fair he grabbed the chance with both hands. In William Friedkin’s Killer Joe  he plays the lead role with sinisterly threatening menace and along with Juno Temple made this one of the best films of 2012. Playing opposite an ultra sexy Nicole Kidman in The Paperboy (2012) brought the role of Ward Jansen, a Miami Times investigative journalist, to life.

 

The love obsessed outlaw Mud.

My latest opportunity to evaluate his body of work was in Mud (2012) where he plays the love-obsessed outlaw of the title in a film that’s seen from the viewpoint of two 14-year-old boys. Ellis and his friend Neckbone travel to a deserted river island to make a secret ‘camp’ in a boat that has been lodged up a tree from a storm, there living in the boat they find a man called Mud. He tells them that he killed a man in Texas that was beating a pregnant woman, the same women he has been in love with since he was at school with her. He goes on to tell them how he plans to renovate the boat so he can meet with Juniper and escape into the sunset. The boys agree to help him by transporting food and equipment to the island but what they don’t know is that the murdered mans family, along with some bounty hunters are following Juniper with the aim of flushing out Mud and carrying out their own form of retribution.

 

Neckbone and Ellis.

This coming of age adventure drama, written and directed by Jeff Nichols, is set on the banks of the Mississippi River in Arkansas and brings to mind the Mark Twain novels of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, a character that was based on Twains boyhood friend Tom Blankenship and the name of a character in the film played by the great Sam Shepard (Blackthorn 2011)!

 

Juniper.

A movie about the power of love and how it lets you down if you believe in it too much but one that is surprisingly male dominated in which women are shown as untrustworthy and hard to pin down. This rich slice of Americana has a great script that goes far deeper than the adventure story it appears to be on the surface. A large pat on the back must go to DOP Adam Stone for making it such a good-looking picture. But it’s the acting that really makes this film stand out with McConaughey in his most watchable role to date but one that’s nearly upstaged by the raw talent of 16-year-old Tye Sheridan (The Tree of Life 2010) who plays Ellis; Neckbone is played by Jacob Lofland who appears to be a natural actor in only his debut feature film. The movie also includes Reese Witherspoon as Juniper, Michael Shannon as Neckbone’s Uncle Galen and the veteran actor Joe Don Baker as King the father of the man Mud killed. Certainly one of the best and most enjoyable films I’ve seen this year from a director who shows great promise.