"A grand story of redemption, laced with barbecued wit and slopped with intrigue, CHRYSTAL is a high heaping of brilliant storytelling. Filmmaker Ray McKinnon, who also co-stars as a vermin like yahoo, has plucked out a grand tale from the deep, with rich chords of human turmoil. CHRYSTAL is, beneath its murky layers, a wonderfully crafted tale of good vs. evil, told in the dirty mud of man's essence."
-- Duane Barge, Hollywood Reporter
"Traditionally told yarn is well built with special attention given to the main character's deep motivations and paradoxical natures. Thornton effectively puts across a man who knows he will never escape his past mistakes but might be capable of providing some release for Chrystal (Lisa Blount) for all the pain he has caused her."
-- Todd McCarthy, Daily Variety
"One of the strongest films in the Sundance dramatic competition was Ray McKinnon's CHRYSTAL, starring Billy Bob Thornton and Lisa Blount"
-- Harlan Jacobson, USA Today
"The Georgia born McKinnon artfully limns Joe and Chrystal's hardscrabble world, populating it with unforgettable characters. Southerners, so often portrayed as red necks or romantics, are neither here, but only people - some good, some bad -- struggling to get by. Thornton and Blount imprint CHRYSTAL with a harrowing and indelible evocation of loss and the fragility of life."
-- Pam Grady, Reel.com
"Steeped in the southern miasma of regional music and smoky barbecue, CHRYSTAL doesn't need to pull cinematic tricks, but McKinnon pulls no punches either. In its quietest moments, CHRYSTAL is powerful and emotional. The highest praise that can be given CHRYSTAL is that, time after time, it contains scenes that are unthinkable, yet completely believable."
-- John Cooper, Sundance Film Festival
* * * * * * * * * *
Chrystal
By Duane Byrge
The Hollywood Reporter
Bottom line: Billy Bob Thornton goes south of "Deliverance" in this wonderfully swampy story.
Sundance Film Festival
PARK CITY -- Billy Bob and Harry Dean way down in the Ozarks -- you don't get further off the beaten path of regional story with Messrs. Thornton and Stanton fightin' and pickin' down in the swampland. And deep amid the swampy vines and crazed hounds, there's a big story snaking through the hills. Joe (Thornton) has wandered back to his home after 20 years in the pen for assorted things, mainly involving matters with the DEA, and he's looking to set things right. Well, he's not quite sure about that.
A Sundance favorite with its backroad twangs, "Chrystal" is likely to shine among indie-film viewers. Gurgling with the primeval fluids of survival, "Chrystal" is a way-off-the beaten-path yarn. Like the piercing cry of a steel guitar, it cradles its way into areas that folks have always struggled in -- whether in a prophet's robe, con's garb or a suit and tie.
Joe is haunted by what happened the night he landed in jail. He drove his wife, Chrystal (Lisa Blount), and young child off the road while being pursued by the law. The baby died and, in a sense, his wife did, too. For the duration of his absence, she has languished in near catatonia, taking lovers and barely subsisting in a backwoods shack. When Joe returns, he tries to make things right
his wife's malaise deepens his anguish, and he clearly sees the ill fruits of his prior actions.
A grand story of redemption, laced with barbecued wit and slopped with intrigue, "Chrystal" is a high heaping of brilliant storytelling. Filmmaker Ray McKinnon, who also co-stars as a verminlike yahoo, has plucked out a grand tale from the deep, with rich chords of human turmoil. "Chrystal" is, beneath its mucky layers, a wonderfully crafted tale of good vs. evil, told in the dirty mud of man's essence.
Subdued and determined, Thornton is terrific as the determined, justice-dispensing Joe. Blount's performance as his depressed, sliding wife is rife with sadness and decent spirits, while McKinnon is redneck evil incarnate. Stanton's gnarly grace and down-home manner is a welcome garnish.
Under McKinnon's hard-strumming directorial hand, the technical team lays out a teeming tale: Stephen Trask's dirt 'n' hurt score, layered back by music supervisor Don Fleming's sounds, ring out with piles of lowlife wisdom.
Chrystal
Running time -- 120 minutes
MPAA Rating: Rated R For Sexuality, Nudity, Drug Content, Violence and Language.
© 2004 The Hollywood Reporter
* * * * * * * * * *
Chrystal
By PAM GRADY
Reel.com
Starring: Billy Bob Thornton, Lisa Blount
Director: Ray McKinnon
Synopsis: A man returns to his hometown in the Ozark Mountains, trying to come to terms with his wife after serving time for killing their son in a car accident.
Runtime: 120 minutes
MPAA Rating: Rated R For Sexuality, Nudity, Drug Content, Violence and Language.
Genres: Drama, Indie
CHRYSTAL (2004) -- A young marijuana farmer fleeing from the law with his wife and child in the car misses a turn in Arkansas' treacherous Ozark Mountains. The woman breaks her neck, the baby flies through the windshield never to be seen again, and a young husband lands in prison, though the guilt he feels is something that no amount of incarceration can ever assuage. That is the set-up for writer/director Ray McKinnon's atmospheric feature debut, a Southern gothic tale of unforgivable sin and redemption.
After 20 years in jail, Joe (Billy Bob Thornton) returns to his wife Chrystal (Lisa Blount) and their Arkansas home, not expecting reconciliation but because he has nowhere else to go. The intervening years between the car crash and his parole have been cruel to both. He's a living, breathing ghost and she's half-insane with the constant pain in her vertebrae and unending grief for her lost son, numbing the intensity of her feelings with sexual promiscuity. The couple's reunion brings no peace. Living under the same roof, they are merely sharing a cell in hell.
If there is to be a brighter future for Joe or Chrystal, help will have to come from outside. The odds aren't promising. Joe returns to his pot-growing ways, but he's unwilling to bend to the will of local drug kingpin Snake (an exuberant and sleazily charismatic Ray McKinnon) with potentially fatal consequences. Chrystal flirts with outright madness, half believing the psychic who tells her that her baby is living inside her battering neck, but when Kalid (Harry Lennix), a Chicago musicologist comes to town researching folk traditions, he re-ignites her interest in music and poetry, offering her a window back to life.
The Georgia-born McKinnon artfully limns Joe and Chrystal's hardscrabble world, populating it with unforgettable characters, such as Grace Zabriskie as Chrystal's tough but tender mother and Harry Dean Stanton as Pa Da, the local musician Kalid seeks. Southerners, so often portrayed in movies as either rednecks or romantics, are neither here, but only people—some good, some bad—struggling to get by. In the film's most unforgettable moment, Snake and Joe have it out in a bare-knuckle brawl while somewhere across town Chrystal begins to reclaim her life, singing with Pa Da's band.
Chrystal begins slowly and a bit unevenly, but as McKinnon settles into the rhythms of his story, the drama gains power as the story movingly unfolds. Ironically, McKinnon's biggest gamble is in casting Thornton; without the actor's presence the film probably would not have gotten financing. It's a risk, though, to have Thornton play a beaten-down character like Joe, as close as it is to roles he has so often played in movies, such as Monster's Ball and Levity. But in delivering a finely honed portrait of unending grief and guilt, a lost soul beyond solace, Thornton makes good on McKinnon's bet. Together, Thornton and Blount, imprint Chrystal with a harrowing and indelible evocation of loss and the fragility of life.
* * * * * * * * * *
SOUTHERN-FRIED CINEMA
BY EMILY KOSCHESKI Northwest Arkansas Times
April 3, 2005
California girl is probably not a term Lisa Blount would use to describe herself. Hillbilly, she says, is much more accurate. It’s often regarded as a derogatory word, she admits. But Blount’s Arkansas roots go back 200 years, and when people ask where she’s from, she has no qualms about telling them. "I say there’s honor in being from the hills," she said in a telephone interview from her Hollywood, Calif., home. "I’m very proud to be where I’m from, the Ozark Mountains. Elvis Presley called himself a hillbilly. If it’s good enough for Elvis, it’s good enough for me." Born in Fayetteville, Blount lived in Arkansas until the age of 19, when she moved to California to pursue a film career. Since then, she has appeared in a slew of movies and television shows. Although more than 20 years have passed since she obtained her first role, the project she is most proud of doesn’t debut commercially until next week. "Chrystal," the first feature film she has produced, opens April 15 in Fayetteville and this Friday in Little Rock and Atlanta. The story of a Southern woman whose husband returns home 16 years after driving her and their child off a cliff while running from the police, "Chrystal" stars Blount as the title character and Billy Bob Thornton as Joe, her estranged spouse.
Written by Blount’s husband, Ray McKinnon, the movie was shot entirely in rural Eureka Springs. The couple, along with their production company partner, Walton Goggins, submitted the film to the Sundance Film Festival in January 2004. It was selected as one of 16 works to compete in the dramatic category.
The trio, who won an Academy Award in 2001 for their short film "The Accountant," had one purpose with "Chrystal": to create a movie about the South that was authentic in every way. The writings of McKinnon, a native of small-town Georgia, have often been compared with those of Flannery O’Connor and Tennessee Williams, but Blount feels his most recent work surpasses even the Southern literary greats’ in terms of realism, she said.
"‘Chrystal’ is a melodrama, almost operatic," she said. "It has elements of humor … but it also has a lot of elements of deep, real truth. It’s difficult to put in words, but it’s a Southernness that I think only another Southern person could recognize."
A place of perseverance Since she was a little girl, Blount has harbored a passion for the silver screen, she said. She can’t pinpoint the exact reason why. "I [did] whatever I could do to show out," she said. "That’s really what I think I was doing."
After moving to central Arkansas from Fayetteville as a toddler, Blount immersed herself in Jacksonville’s community theater. Her mother nurtured the child’s ostentatious spirit, hauling her to and from cheerleading, voice and dance lessons.
But she didn’t forget academics. By the time Blount was 17, she had skipped her senior year of high school and was attending college at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
One day, her father saw an ad in the Arkansas Gazette requesting extras for "9/30/55," an autobiographical movie fellow Arkansan Jim Bridges was shooting. Auditions were taking place at a Holiday Inn near Conway, and Blount set out to attend.
However, she wasn’t planning to settle for the role in the ad — she wanted something bigger. She decided to audition for the role of Billie Jean, a woman who worshiped a character named Vampira. Blount caked her face in gothic makeup and drove to Toad Suck Ferry. Her new look, she thought, would surely make an impression.
She waited on the hotel’s concrete steps for hours before anyone even spoke to her. "There I was in this get-up, and they wouldn’t see me," she said. "I just sat there and sat there. I [finally] read my little piece, and they liked it. Apparently, they already had that role cast, and they paid her off and hired me."
Bridges, she said, got a kick out of her ambition. It paid off — the job allowed her to break into the business. Almost immediately, she gathered her things and moved to Hollywood. "I [had] to take advantage of the circumstances," Blount explained.
Five years later, she was cast alongside Debra Winger in the award-winning film "An Officer and a Gentleman." Although she credits Bridges for introducing her to some of the industry’s influential people, it wasn’t he alone who put her on the path to success. More important factors were her bravery and tenacity — talent had little to do with it, she said. "Young people have a naive ambition and determination that says, ‘ I don’t care what my chances are, I don’t care what the statistics say, ’" she said. "If you were just to sit down and think about it, what makes a person successful, I didn’t have the package that would put me in that group. I wasn’t pretty enough, I had a Southern accent, and to be honest with you, I don’t really think I was that good. But I was determined."
From intuition to fruition It doesn’t happen all the time, she said, but a few times in her life, Blount has known intrinsically that a project would succeed.
While making "The Accountant," she remembers walking away from the set to call a girlfriend and dishing her gut feeling that the movie would win an Oscar. Everyone, including McKinnon, thought she was crazy. "But I believed it," she said, "and by goodness, we did win."
The ceremony was a surreal — and nauseating — experience. When the couple’s category was finally announced, Blount had only one thing on her mind. "By that point … I was thinking, ‘ If I have to get up, I know I’m going to faint, ’" she said. "I am so surprised that nobody’s ever just gone down up there."
Blount’s premonition is that "Chrystal" will shine for the same reason "The Accountant" did: its truthfulness.
The movie has been "written and rewritten and rewritten," she said. Though McKinnon’s name appears on the script, the couple — who met on a plane en route to the set of the 1993 movie "Needful Things" — are a screenwriting team, with Blount serving as story editor. "The fact that we can … pool our talents — that is the secret to what may be our success," she said. "I like our work and make no apologies for the fact that I think our movies are unique in their perspective."
Although Blount regrets it, the couple will not be coming to Fayetteville for the movie’s local premiere because of several previous engagements. As a girl, she spent her summers in Northwest Arkansas, and she considers the area to be her true home. "Though I didn’t live in Fayetteville very long … that is my sense of culture. That is who I am," she said. "Though we moved around a lot, I always returned back to that place. That’s where I relate to as my real home."
When the Hollywood Bowl amphitheater opens for its summer season, more than 10,000 people will be driving on the road where she lives, she said. She called the hectic nature of Los Angeles "stifling" for her and McKinnon, who both grew up where the pace is a little more relaxed. Their work forces them to stay in California for now. But soon, Blount said, they will definitely be moving back to the South. "We both know just exactly what it’s like to wake up in Los Angeles every day," she said. "We’ve decided we’d like to find out what it’s like to wake up some other place."
* * * * * * * * * *
DARK CHRYSTAL
Actor/director Ray McKinnon revels in the real South
BY CURT HOLMAN
Creative Loafing – Atlanta
Filmmaker and character actor Ray McKinnon has spent his career playing against Southern clichés.
A native of Adel, Ga., McKinnon has a long, lanky frame and gentle drawl that, from his first film role as "Alabama trooper No. 1" in Driving Miss Daisy, threatened to pigeonhole him as a harmless good ol' boy. He could have settled into a successful niche playing, say, quirky deputies alongside bullying sheriffs, but instead he broke the mold for rural characters. He recently finished the recurring portrayal of "Deadwood's" doomed preacher and may be most familiar as Holly Hunter's high-strung suitor in O Brother, Where Art Thou?
But Hollywood's condescension toward the South never left him laughing. After a stint doing stage work in Atlanta, McKinnon moved to Los Angeles in the late 1980s to break into films, and he was shocked by the stereotyping he found there.
"I was really naive back then," McKinnon recalls during an interview at a Los Angeles bistro. "I'd audition for roles in movies ... and I'd read the dialogue and the setting and say, 'This is crap. How is this possible?'" With a passion to do justice to his home region, he started writing scripts that chronicled not the cute, quaint South, or even the slick New South, but the true, unique South.
In 2002, McKinnon won an Oscar for writing, directing and playing the title character in "The Accountant," a short film that, despite its 38-minute running time, remains one of the best - and funniest - movies ever made about the realities of Dixie. And with his first feature film, Chrystal, he attempts to build on "The Accountant's" below-the-radar popularity with a dark Southern drama that owes more to Jim Jarmusch than Sweet Home Alabama.
McKinnon's wife and co-producer, Lisa Blount (best known as Debra Winger's mercenary pal in An Officer and a Gentleman), plays Chrystal's title role, an agonized woman living in the Ozarks 16 years after losing her son - and breaking her back - when her husband Joe (Billy Bob Thornton) crashed their car during a police chase. Joe returns after years in jail on drug charges to seek redemption from his wife.
In the tradition of a Tennessee Williams heroine, Chrystal's sanity and sexuality have both run off the rails: In an early scene, she services young football players in the back of a car. "I was very influenced by independent films and wanted to write something that was way, way independent. I wanted to do something that was Southern, but that also had a madness to it." McKinnon further fuels Chrystal's live-wire intensity by portraying Snake, a hillbilly drug lord who tries to bring Joe back into the fold.
Seeking to get Chrystal financed, McKinnon discovered that his script's mountain madness scared off many potential backers, one of whom sniffed, "Who are these country people?" McKinnon sought to answer that question in Chrystal by revealing both the dark side and the dignity of "country people."
"For some reason, things in the South are more distilled, more amplified. There's this great beauty to the South, and this great darkness," he says.
McKinnon shared his dedication for regional authenticity with his castmates and co-producers, Blount and "The Shield's" Walt Goggins, a Lithia Springs native (who first worked with McKinnon when they played drug dealers on "In the Heat of the Night").
"Most Southern films are written by people who have never spent any significant time in the South. They write from a memory of other movies," says McKinnon. "Whereas we know these guys. We grew up with these guys. Guys like Snake scared the shit out of me, and I was from a small Southern town."
McKinnon filmed Chrystal on location in the Ozarks, not far from Blount's hometown of Fayetteville, Ark. He can't figure out why films aren't shot more often in America's most culturally rich settings. "Here's a beautiful place, right in the middle of our country, that seldom gets a cinematographic exploration. Why is that? I see movies that have no sense of place, because they're shot in Toronto or Romania."
A rough cut of Chrystal received a mixed reception at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, but saw greater success at festivals in Savannah and Stockholm (where Blount won a best actress award). McKinnon feels it's easily misunderstood.
"Chrystal has been described, on a sound-bite level, as being about a man and woman who lose their child and the man returns for forgiveness. That makes it sound like this heavy, plodding drama, but it's misleading to say it's like Monster's Ball or In the Bedroom. There's uproarious stuff going on, too." Chrystal grooves to mountain music and lightens up considerably with the antics of Goggins' backwoods pothead and friends.
After Chrystal's limited release in the South, McKinnon plans to begin work on his second feature, a Georgia-set comedy called Randy and the Mob, in which he plays estranged twin brothers. But even doing light fare, don't expect cookie-cutter cornpone farce from the filmmaker. When it comes to chronicling the South on screen, he's a rebel.
SOUTHERN MAN
Ray McKinnon’s ‘The Accountant’ compounds interest
By Curt Holman
Creative Loafing – Atlanta
You can order a DVD of the short film “The Accountant” on the website of filmmaker Ray McKinnon’s Ginny Mule production company (www.ginnymule.com) — and in fact, if you have any interest in Southern movies, or funny movies, or excellent movies of any kind, you must. The little-seen short may be one of the most essential films ever made about the South.
I first saw “The Accountant” on a screener with other short films playing the 2001 Atlanta Film Festival. I popped it in the VCR knowing nothing but McKinnon’s local connections, and found myself mesmerized within minutes. When my wife came home from work that night, I insisted she watch it immediately, and she fell under its sway as well. Then I had to show it to all my friends, who not only loved it, too, but often wanted their own copy. Infectiously watchable, “The Accountant” resembles the kind of supernatural video you find in movies like The Ring.
At first, the hilarious, pitch-perfect dark comedy unfolds like a modern-day Flannery O’Connor tale. A farmer (Eddie King) and his white-collar brother (Walton Goggins) face foreclosure of the family farm when a drawling, chain-smoking, hard-drinking number-cruncher (McKinnon) comes up with a dangerously unorthodox solution.
“My God, where’s this coming from?” McKinnon asked himself while writing “The Accountant’s” first draft over a white-hot two-week period. After the fact, he realized that “The Accountant’s” inspiration came from two sources. Every time he drove from the Atlanta airport to his hometown of Adel, he saw a beautiful but abandoned farmhouse, and alongside it, a modest trailer where the family actually lived. Writing “The Accountant” gave him a way to imagine the family’s story.
His script also derives from a rural version of an urban legend. “Growing up, I heard about this guy who’d cut off a digit from time to time to get insurance money: You’d get a certain amount for a leg, a certain amount for an arm. Not so much for a finger — but he didn’t have high aims, just drinkin’ money. A little toe, you might get a couple of six packs. True or not, the story stuck with me.”
“The Accountant” ingeniously balances black humor with the plight of a family farm, then takes a mind-boggling turn. McKinnon’s bean counter spins disturbingly plausible conspiracy theories about the media distortions of South and the homogenization of America. He even intimates that future Chrystal star Billy Bob Thornton may not be a real person. The accountant neatly sums up his beliefs about the vanishing Southern way of life in a line about the restaurant chain, Boston Market. He tells the brothers, “One day your kids’ll eat cornbread that’s sweet, and drink ice tea that ain’t, and think that’s a Southern tradition.”
While making the film, McKinnon wondered whether the short would speak to anyone beyond his immediate circle of friends and fellow filmmakers.
“I certainly hoped it would resonate with Southerners, especially a certain kind of Southerner who’s thoughtful, who’s gone to Jackson, Miss., and said, ‘This could be anywhere in America.’ Because everywhere you go, there’s Chili’s For Ribs and Best Buys and the Hilton. You could be in Jackson, or you could be in Southern California.” And it’s not just a Southern matter. “The homogeny and pop-culturalization is happening all over the world.”
He found a firsthand example of the ‘mall-ization’ of the South when he scouted for a suitable farmhouse within a 35-mile radius of Atlanta for a shooting location. “I found out that a 35-mile radius of Atlanta, was Atlanta.” Even the twanging Jimmie Dale Gilmore tune playing over the opening credits fakes out the audience, according to the filmmaker. He likes that viewers will sit down with “The Accountant” and think at first, “Oh, this is one of those country movies. Here’s the shots of the cotton fields, here’s the country music playing, and — holy shit, that’s ‘Mack the Knife!’”
“The Accountant” not only subverts expectations for Southern film, its cunning satire exposes unsettling cultural trends with implications far beyond the Mason-Dixon line.
“The Accountant” won Best Short Film at the 2002 Academy Awards, after a qualifying run at the Atlanta Film Festival, and McKinnon says that though he’s proud of it, he won’t let the Oscar go to his head. “I have to keep it in proper size. The accolades have been very nice, but it is a short film, it’s not Best Picture.”
In fact, the Oscar statuette makes him a little uneasy.
“First of all, it’s too shiny. I’ll be going along in my house, being the goofy doofus that I am, and I see this shiny thing and think, ‘Oh my God, I have to be a proper citizen.’ I don’t like having it around, really. So I hid it, so I don’t have to see it and no one will steal it — but then I couldn’t find it for two weeks.”
Perhaps McKinnon should hire an accountant to keep track of it.
curt.holman@creativeloafing.com
03.30.05
|
