Flesh and Bone Reviews

A darkly compelling psychological thriller, FLESH AND BONE recalls the downbeat films of the 1970s with its story of true love threatened by the dark secrets of the past. An isolated farm house, a decent, hard-working farm family and a lost boy with a tiny blue star tattooed on his scalp; from the way the dog barks, the wind chimes jangle and the screen door creaks, we know the stage is set for something very bad to happen. In the dark of the night, the boy creeps downstairs and opens the front door, admitting his father, a brutal thief. The family awakes, and the burglar kills them, all but the little baby who's left crying upstairs. Two decades later, Arlis Sweeney (Dennis Quaid) sells vending machine products, criss-crossing the same stretch of desolate countryside week after week, month after month. His future stretches ahead of him like a familiar expanse of highway, and he likes it that way. With a girl in every seedy motel room and a home in the cab of his battered truck, he's a man who doesn't trust surprises. His steady, if eccentric, life is disturbed by the vivacious Kay (Meg Ryan), who's first seen leaping out of a cake at a redneck bar stag party; when she passes out, the compassionate proprietor asks reliable Arlis to see that she gets home. A free spirit with more grit than good sense, Kay is unhappily married and falls quickly in love with Arlis. He falls for her as well, but there's something troubling in his past that threatens to poison the present and negate any hope they may have of future happiness. A nocturnal visit from Arlis's charming but viciously criminal father, Roy (James Caan) and his nubile girlfriend Ginnie (Gwyneth Paltrow) signals the beginning of the end of Kay and Arlis's fragile romance: before we ever see his tattoo, we know Arlis is the boy from the prologue and Kay, of course, the wailing infant. When Roy figures out who she is, Arlis is faced with not one, but two impossible dilemmas. Does he confess his past to Kay and risk losing her, or continue to withhold what he knows and destroy any hope of an open and honest relationship? And does he let Roy kill Kay (because, Roy says off-handedly, he knows Arlis is too weak not to tell her everything) or does he stand up, for the first time, to his monstrous father? Things can only end badly, and though Arlis saves Kay's life, he has to leave her to ensure that he'll never hurt her with the things he knows. Dark and soul sick, FLESH AND BONE is a claustrophobic character study set against wide open spaces and windswept plains, a tale of fate and the inexorable power of the past played with all the gravity its near-mythic subject matter demands. Writer/director Steve Kloves was previously responsible for the lighter romance THE FABULOUS BAKER BOYS (though only slightly lighter; for all the sexy banter, it's driven by the taste of disappointment and curdled pina coladas); here he weaves a complex and disturbing tapestry of elements as disparate as pastel colored chickens (they play tick-tac-toe) and patricide. Carefully written and flawlessly acted, FLESH AND BONE balances elements so intense and unlikely that they would sink a lesser film, coated with an overwhelming sense of the oppressive weight of destiny. The film is rooted in a novelistic sense of character, complex and contradictory, and buoyed up by uniformly fine performances. Ryan is the weakest link in the chain, her perkiness sometimes threatening to transform the film into a tale of charming eccentricity, but Quaid, Caan and Paltrow more than make up for her distracting sunniness. FLESH AND BONE was widely taken to task for some of the story's unlikely turns, but that criticism misses the point--it's not a realist melodrama. It's a tragedy, a classical story of fate and the futility of trying to avoid one's destiny, and as such it's grimly successful. (Adult situations, violence, sexual situations.)