How does one assemble a cast including Kris Kristofferson, Dwight Yoakam, Val Kilmer, and Hilary Duff, hire T-Bone Burnett as a musical director, and emerge with an atrocious film? Not only could Bloodworth director Shane Dax Taylor offer incisive pointers on this, but he could also conceivably be hired to teach a course on the subject. As an adaptation of William Gay's 2002 novel Provinces of Night, everything about this rural ensemble drama feels built for greatness, but sloppy and stupid. In fact, the film only succeeds at eliciting unintentional laughter.
The story involves Fleming Bloodworth (Reece Daniel Thompson), a high school senior growing up in what may be the most dysfunctional family in contemporary Tennessee. The boy's mother has hightailed it out of town; his dad, Boyd (Yoakam), is a grungy blue-collar thug with a psychotically violent streak, desperate for revenge against his estranged wife; Fleming's uncle Brady (W. Earl Brown) is a mentally retarded and superstitious Christian evangelical still bent out of shape over his filial abandonment as a child; and his other uncle, Warren (Kilmer), is a drunken, womanizing bar owner who frequents a local bordello. Into this nest of domestic bliss wanders the patriarch, E.F. Bloodworth (Kristofferson), who abandoned kith and kin 40 years earlier to eke out a living as a country musician. These days, he's apparently fleeing a scandal involving some stolen cattle.
The word "apparently" cannot be overemphasized, because the events that bring E.F. back to town are so hopelessly murky; the same applies to his character's motivations. The film periodically hints at his desire to make amends with the Bloodworth clan, although this never really plays out; he simply wanders around in aimless and shapeless scenes, battles cryptic nightmares involving an unclear family tragedy, and hides out from a law enforcement official who evidently wants to drill him with questions (or arraign him, or shoot him -- we're never sure which) regarding his dealings with the said livestock.
The film suffers most dramatically from the lack of clarity concerning E.F., and from the poorly defined roles for the Bloodworth sons. As the movie stands, Fleming emerges as the main character, and his central desire seems to merely be an escape from the wiles of this crude, ignorant family -- so that every action taken by one of the adult men seems designed to repulse him, to drive him back toward getting his GED and into the arms of Raven Lee Halfacre (Duff), the comely daughter of a prostitute whose upsetting home life can compete with his own. These narrative developments are easily ascertained but dramatically uninteresting. Other substories crop up -- involving Boyd's vengeance against his wife, involving E.F.'s wife's (Frances Conroy) impending dementia -- that seem dropped in from out of nowhere, and abandoned without any further elaboration. The subplot involving Boyd feels so absurd -- in its violence, in the deranged husband's nonsensical greeting to his wife, in its lack of resolution -- that it directly points to the history of this truncated film, which began as a 110-minute feature called Provinces of Night but had nearly half an hour of footage chopped out after a less than unanimously enthusiastic response on the festival circuit.
Another critical issue of the film is its off-the-wall dialogue. Cast member Brown doubles as screenwriter, and seems to have no clear understanding of how to bury or veil character motivations within a scene and let them emerge subtly. Instead, all of the characters speak their desires, on-the-nose, and we often feel that we've been dropped into the middle of some overheated, Southern-fried soap opera. At other times, extreme events occur (such as the immolation of a cabin) and we have no idea why they are transpiring -- a very bad sign indeed.
Overall, Duff is the only actor to emerge from this farrago without mud on her face, and she somehow manages to establish a multidimensional character and convey various shades of emotion in defiance of the scenes and plot developments she must endure. She's an unexpectedly bright spot in an otherwise confusing, disappointing mess of a movie.