The Culture War Gets Visceral in `Red State'
In 1970, Roger Ebert called his and Russ Meyer's quintessential sexploitation comedy Beyond the Valley of the Dolls a "horror comedy satire". Add the adjectives "political" and "religious", and the same thing can be said of Kevin Smith's latest black comedy, Red State, where the smoke of the culture wars turn lethal and real.
Red State tells the story of a Fred Phelps-esque cult pastor named Reverend Abin Cooper (played to the hilt by Michael Parks), who protests the sexual immorality of today's society, with all those queers and faggots and adulterers and forrr-nicators out there -- when he isn't stockpiling assault weapons for the apocalypse.
"A Kevin Smith movie" has it's own connotations of style and considerable Gen-X charms, for anyone who's seen Clerks, Chasing Amy, Clerks II, or his adventures with Jay and Silent Bob. This film, however, is really more the work of a skillful film geek given free reign to play with his favorite directors and styles. Red State is a Coen Brothers movie, mixed in with a big slice of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez (especially Kill Bill, which Parks co-starred in -- the casting was no accident), and a goodly sprinkling of Saw tricks and treats. (Though while graphic, it is far less gratuitously ultra-violent and gory than either of those two films, so you need not be spooked; it's the style and the special effects that were carried over.)
After a CSI-style teaser opening, introducing the very un-Christian Rev. Cooper, we open with three small-town teenage boys (rising indie star Michael Angarano the most prominent of the bunch), who might just as well be characters from a Tom Waits or John Cougar Mellencamp song come to life. All are itchin' to lose something, and I don't mean their car keys. But their rural, dead-end tank town's high school and community college offer slim pickins' of wild, willing and still-unattached gals their age.
Technology to the rescue! While cruising some online sex ads, filled to the brim with hotties from LA, New York, San Francisco, and Vegas, they find an ad for an older woman in her forties (Melissa Leo) looking for some uninhibited young lovin' right there in town! Yeah, she's a little long in the tooth, but she's sexy in a MILF-y sort of way and she's just a few miles away! It's almost too good to be true.
And it is. She's the Reverend Cooper's adult daughter. Like Matlock getting the drop on the murderer of the week, the Church has set a new trap, to snare the town's immoral, fleshly, lustful youngsters, and surely teach the ones left behind the true meaning of "abstinence only". The trio are kidnapped (shirtless and in their underwear, natch) and taken to the Reverend's religious compound, where they get the pleasure of seeing the Rev giving an oddly cheerful, symphonic snake-oil soliloquy of fire and damnation before the Church pronounces eternal judgment on their sins -- on their own built-in sacrificial altar.
The Reverend isn't the only one who's taken an interest in these troublemaking teens, though. The town sheriff (a drunken buffoon in the most cartoonish country-song sense) is out looking for them too, but he doesn't even know they've been kidnapped yet. They sideswiped his car while he was in the middle of a sex act, and he furiously wants them (and their car) found ASAP. His earnest young deputy finds it, all right -- parked in the locked-down lot of the Church, and goes straight to heaven for his trouble.
But what the local yokels don't know is that the Reverend has been under some warrantless-wiretap surveillance for months. Now that the kids have been taken and the deputy killed, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms finally has good cause to make their move on the compound -- and the town itself. Just as our Tea Party friends would certainly tell you, the sole and only purpose of state and local authorities is to be overruled and embarrassed by mandate-writing Senators and elite federal judges, right? True enough, the Feds quite literally push the incompetent sheriff aside, and start running the show for themselves, to predictably disastrous results.
Enter John Goodman as the ground-crew ATF commander, who for his part, has serious doubts about the mission impossible his crew has been assigned to accomplish. But his uber-boss, a man only addressed on Goodman's cell phone as "Sir" (and you just know that it's that "secular elitist" himself, Barack Obama, on the other end of the line) is calling the shots. Despite Goodman's misgivings, the orders come down from above: they are to retake the compound and put those right-wingnuts in their place by whatever "show of force" necessary -- just like the good old days of Waco, Ruby Ridge, and Elian Gonzalez. And you can bet that from then on, all hell indeed breaks loose.
Without giving away any further details, the movie is even-minded in its cinematic and political target practice. While the Reverend and his church are clearly cuckoo, the Feds are just as high-handed, arrogant, and evil as Ron Paul's -- or even Timothy McVeigh's -- worst nightmare. The film pulls off the hat trick of having no truly likable characters, and yet these seemingly-broad cartoons have just enough humanity to keep them real.
At the beginning of the movie, the three horn-dog teens are the kind of sweaty, crude boys that most girls (or gay men) would cross to the other side of the street to avoid; and yet when they're fighting for their lives in the Church's torture chambers, we're rooting for them all the way. Even the Reverend and his wife and daughter have their own charms and humanity.
(And where else but a Kevin Smith movie could you see Betty Aberlin -- yes, "Lady Aberlin" of Mister Rogers fame, and in a different way, just as delightful here -- playing the Reverend's shotgun-toting wife and Leo's earth-mother, praying to "send the sinners straight to hell!") All the actors clearly relish their roles, and plays them believably and with conviction.
Today, we live in a world riven by a culture-war Tower of Babble, by what I once heard a literary agent rightly call "the Media-Industrial Complex". A world where even as our political discourse turns up to 11, the very words we use to fight our battles have lost their meaning. Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh accuse Olympia Snowe, Dianne Feinstein, Max Baucus, Ben Bernanke, and even Sandra Day O'Connor and Richard Nixon of being "liberals". Howard Dean and Bernie Sanders think Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter were "conservative", and that Bill Clinton was just a Rockefeller or Eisenhower "Republican". God help us indeed.
That is what gives Red State it's power, besides the crackerjack performances and Tarantino-esque stylishness, this all-too-real backdrop of societal schizophrenia. It's easily Smith's best film since the two Clerks movies and Chasing Amy, and just as religiously provocative as his Dogma. And while not even in the same neighborhood as Dr. Strangelove (or even Nine to Five), like those gold standards, this clearly satirical, over-the-top black comedy is just plausible enough to really have happened. And that means that the joke is on us.
Note: Red State is listed by Wikipedia as releasing theatrically on October 19th, but it is currently available through next week on most cable and TiVo/satellite systems On Demand. Smith is using the film as a sort of test-pilot for a very unusual, market-by-market releasing strategy, so "check your local listings" or look online. For example, the Blu-Ray and DVD are due to be released on October 18th -- a day ahead of theatres, though it already had an "Oscar qualifying" screening in Los Angeles in August with a Q&A with Smith.
