Country:
USA
Recognizable Faces:
Michael Parks
Melissa Leo
John Goodman
Anna Gunn
Matt L. Jones
Stephen Root
Patrick Fischler
Directed By:
Kevin Smith
I have this history with Kevin Smith. MALLRATS was one of the two movies I have watched obsessively during my college years, learning the dialogs almost by heart. His "View Askewniverse" I thought parodied very well a generation of an energetic and directionless young people, lost in pop culture. So I registered to the View Askew forum a few years back (costs money, believe it or not) and I got a dose of reality straight in the teeth. There's nothing much over there but menial discussion and Kevin Smith worship. When he decided to move on from the View Askew legacy after CLERKS 2 (which was very good), I got a bit worried. What else did he have? After the COP OUT debacle, things got out of control. Smith seemed to have difficulty to contain his ego and take any form of criticism. I watched RED STATE knowing it was Smith's long shot, almost his baby. My esteemed colleague Larry Taylor posted the most intriguing review about it. Knowing that Smith has a very straightforward approach to cinema, how "messy"* could it really get? I wanted to have my own opinion on it.
You can really separate the story in three blocks. First, the introduction of Travis (Michael Angarano), the mulleted Billy Ray (Nicholas Braun) and Jarrod (Kyle Gallner), three horny teenagers looking for sex in all the wrong places (namely, the internet), then their abduction by the Five Points Church of Abin Cooper (Michael Parks) and the very messy rescue process. The movie in itself turns around the Five Points Church and their leader and patriarch Abin, who are more or less a cinematographic representation of the Westboro Baptist Church**. They are a tightly knit community, all linked by blood or marriage and they are living in an irrational fear of god. That makes them hate gay people, protest their funerals and murder the shit out of sinners. Sodomites, fornicators, lovers of debauchery of all sorts. They are the concept of exceptionalism pushed to its extreme. They are the "soul holders of the truth" and everybody outside their closed circle of belief has been corrupted by evil. Basically, they're fucking dangerous.
My main complain about this movie is that there's not a lot of material to work with. There's a brief exposition of who Abin Cooper is (that wasn't very subtle), five minutes later, you're brought to the Five Points Church compound for a very well acted (but oh-so-long) cracked up discourse by Michael Parks, that leads to a cool escape scene that lead to that famous gun fight that everybody talks about. To me, what it seemed is that Kevin Smith tried to tackle down the problem that religion has become in the U.S as a whole, in about eighty minutes. That's quite the task and that could explain the "messy" nature of the movie. Because that's what it is. RED STATE is a movie that doesn't seem to know what direction to take and ends up exploring superficially a lot of things while trying to be deep. It goes from the Westboro Baptist Church to a basically recreation of the Waco Disaster with great brutality and I have to admit a few tricks pulled got me quite horrified and made me appreciate the dark character of the film. I thought the ending was quite brilliant in catching back on the superficiality of the whole thing. Also, nice cameo of Patrick Fischler, of the L.A NOIRE and MAD MEN legacy.
There's a little bit of everything, a few cool ideas for horror, but RED STATE addressed the spectacular aspect of the religious problem in the state and not the causes. While Reverend Abin Cooper is the main figure of the movie (Smith admitted the movie was about Michael Parks, that he would hold on it until Parks accepted), but he comes off as a cardboard bad guy, who's entrenched so deep in his beliefs that everything is very clear to him. There is not depiction of any violence going on in between the Church members (at least not before the gunfight) and there's absolutely no tension whatsoever. Would have I done something different? Yes, I would have left the feds out of that movie and left the whole floor to Abin Cooper's misfits. It felt like Kevin Smith wrote Cooper's discourse and tried to wrap things up quickly after that. There are a few good ideas, few and far between, but RED STATE doesn't know what kind of movie it wants to be and doesn't know what to say beside that religious nuts are...well, nuts. It barely kept my attention and my suspension of disbelief for long enough to keep me interested in Kevin Smith's career.
SCORE: 62%
*Messy is the word often used to describe RED STATE
** Even if the WBC is mentionned in the movie, they clearly were the inspiration for this