Sling Blade (1996)
Directed by Billy Bob Thornton
Karl Childers, a mentally disabled man, has been in the custody of the state mental hospital since the age of 12 for killing his mother and her lover. Although thoroughly institutionalized, he is deemed fit to be released into the outside world.
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More typical and funny is a scene that recalls Peter Sellers' Being There persona, where Vaughn reveals his homosexuality to Karl and then queries the silent listener about his thoughts: “I was thinkin', I'm gonna take me some of these taters home with me.”
As a character, Karl has a surface similarity to Forrest Gump, and he may remind you, as well, of the mentally arrested holy innocents in Rain Man , Being There , or The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser .
If anything, Karl seems too bright for someone raised in a chicken coop by religious fanatics, but writer-director Thornton has nonetheless given us the best portrayal of a troubled man-child since Cliff Robertson in Charly.
Yoakam's performance reminds one of Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet, explosive, unpredictable and frightening.
But the thing about the film is its sneaky similarity to "Psycho II" (1983).
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As a character, Karl has a surface similarity to Forrest Gump, and he may remind you, as well, of the mentally arrested holy innocents in Rain Man , Being There , or The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser .
Sling Blade belongs in a genre with Forrest Gump and Rain Man, developmentally disabled characters who are wiser than the rest of us, but the comparisons stop there.
Thornton's drawing on a character type that should be familiar to most filmgoers, from pictures like "Rain Man" and "Forrest Gump" - but with a background of horrendous primal violence.
Sling Blade effectively asks, "What if Boo Radley from To Kill a Mockingbird was dangerous, his protective instinct leading to murderous rages?"
Like Boo Radley, the hollow- eyed recluse whom Robert Duvall played in "To Kill a Mockingbird," Karl Childers has spent his life on the icy margins of society, lonely and scorned.
There's a little bit of Forrest Gump in him.
One could argue that Sling Blade is a response to the nostalgia and hope brought forth in Forrest Gump , which was released just a couple of years earlier.
While not as successful as the blockbuster Forrest Gump, another 90s-era film about a mentally challenged man from the South, Sling Blade made Billy Bob Thornton a household name.
If “Forrest Gump” had been written by William Faulkner, the result might have been something like “Sling Blade.”
Sling Blade belongs in a genre with Forrest Gump and Rain Man, developmentally disabled characters who are wiser than the rest of us, but the comparisons stop there.
With his loping gait, his thrust-forward jaw, his oddly shaved head and his penchant for buttoning his blue work shirts up to the top button, Karl seems like an odd conflation of Forrest Gump and Pruitt Taylor Vince's shy, overweight pizza cook in last year's "Heavy."
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Sling Blade, the directorial debut of actor/writer Billy Bob Thornton (who scripted One False Move and A Family Thing), is a fascinating examination of a damaged man's quest to make restitution for his past crimes.
I'd never seen the small films my friend told me about, things like "One False Move" (1992), which Thornton cowrote, "The Killing Box" (1993), "Trouble Bound" (1993), or "Dead Man" (1995).
As anyone who saw his turn as the drug-dealing killer Ray in 1992's "One False Move" knows, Thornton is a big, rangy, in-your-face presence he's James Carville re-imagined as a linebacker.
(Thorton previously co-wrote "A Family Thing" and "One False Move," co-starring in the latter.)
Sling Blade marks Thornton's debut as a feature director and solo screenwriter (his previous screenplays, including A Family Thing and his best, One False Move, were written with Tom Epperson).
Acclaimed for his writing on Carl Franklin’s crime drama “One False Move,” Thornton here impressively delineates the details of his troubled characters’ lives and the minutiae of small-town existence.