Ed. Note: Please welcome Matthew to the BH family and encourage him to return. — JN
I’ve followed Kevin Smith’s career since I was old enough to sneak into Dogma, and I fell out of love with him at about the same as everyone else: the one-two punch of the solipsistic Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back and the maudlin, ill-timed Jersey Girl.
What’s funny is how much the rest of Hollywood caught up with Kevin Smith. Even before the raunchy-sweet dude humor of Judd Apatow’s productions took over where Smith’s films left off, Star Wars and Marvel Comics superheroes reemerged in their own ways to national attention and suddenly Smith’s fixations on such nerd culture became a lot less special.
Each Kevin Smith film since Jersey Girl has been a somewhat transparent grasp at reinventing himself as a brand while playing to his longtime fan base (whom he cultivated and sold merchandise to on a level probably unrivaled by anyone but George Lucas.) Clerks 2 was thought of some as a return to form, but to me it reeked of uninspired resignation after claims of growing as an artist. Zack and Miri Make A Porno was, not to be too delicate about it, an attempt to annex fans of Judd Apatow by casting Seth Rogen. Then came Cop Out, his first film written by someone else (Robb & Mark Cullen) which reeked of a “safe bet” with established stars (Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan) and turned out to be anything but – disappointing both at the box office and with critics who were hoping for something special by Smith.
You have to wonder how long and by what process Kevin then decided that an ostensible horror film about murderous Christians would be the film to signal his comeback. Or not: Big Hollywood readers know that the creative community lives in an ideological echo chamber of paranoia where every Christian is just one bad sermon away from murdering the nearest gay teenager. Taking inspiration from Fred Phelps – the infamous pastor whose public protestations of gay and military funerals has given him the rare distinction of provoking equal revulsion from absolutely everyone – the idea of a horror film based on such a figure must have struck Smith as a great idea if only because everyone would be interested to see what a Kevin Smith horror film looked like.
Having now seen The New Beverly Cinema in Hollywood (complete with a Q&A from Smith afterward) I can honestly express some surprise that the film is not half as obnoxiously anti-Conservative Christian as you’d expect of a horror film about crazy killer Christians called Red State. This seems due in part to Smith’s avowed Catholicism but mainly to his mediocrity as a dramatic storyteller and conveyor of ideas.
The story begins with three teenagers (two of whom look way too old to be playing High School) who answer an Internet solicitation for group sex. This turns out to be a trap by psychotic pastor Abin Cooper (Michael Parks) who captures them at his church and prepares to have his congregation murder them one by one. When the town sheriff Wynan (Stephen Root) catches on, he calls in the ATF, headed by Agent Keenan (John Goodman) whose involvement leads to a Waco-style standoff between the ATF and Cooper with the teenagers trapped inside.
If my plot description sounds like it has some kind of coherent narrative through-line, I apologize, because the film certainly does not: Smith seems to lose interest with the film he is making approximately every 30 minutes. At first the high school boys are drawn into a horror film situation out of Eli Roth’s Hostel and I began to gird my loins for a series of gross-out death scenes. Once John Goodman is introduced, the film quickly becomes about him and the ATF instead – an action film with no further “horror” scenes except some bloody headshots during the firefight that ensues outside the compound. When returning to the initial situation of the boys stuck as prisoners inside Parks’ church, Smith starts putting equal dramatic weight on one of their captors, Cheyenne (Kerry Bishé.) These shifts of focus don’t feel like the thoughtful choices of a director like Robert Altman or Smith’s contemporary Quentin Tarantino, but the hard-left turns of an author without confidence or purpose.
Parks and Goodman’s performances are fine, considering what they have to work with. Parks instills a genuine creepiness into his character despite lackluster dialogue – his frequent singing of old hymns was, according to Smith, an on-set improvisation and a nice personality detail. Goodman acquits himself of some hard-to-swallow federal agent dialogue and characterization thanks largely to his own natural likability. He seems to be modeled on Tommy Lee Jones in No Country From Old Men and sure enough, Smith ends the picture with a metaphorical monologue that, unlike the haunting closing speech of No Country, falls to the floor with a dull thud.
I don’t believe Smith made this movie because he hates Christians, but simply because he knows Fred Phelps is a safe target and “Red State” is a quasi-clever title for a horror film. Kevin can barely muster the energy to hate on his Phelps-figure creation: when stopping the film in its tracks so Parks can deliver an awkwardly long sermon about moral decadence, it’s not nearly as unsettling or vitriolic as words of the real life, actual Fred Phelps. Or your local Imam! The ATF and local law enforcement accidentally and illegally kill some of the people inside the church, and Kevin Smith being a creature of the 1990s, this could be perceived as some kind of commentary on Janet Reno’s Waco fiasco. However, the inherent shallowness of the story suggests this is mainly a convenient way to escalate the horror-film scenario into a full-blown action movie, rather than being any satirical comment on the use of excessive force by the federal government. This is a film whose beliefs are so reflexive and dispassionate that even the most hardcore haters of religion will leave the theater unfulfilled.
Smith told a very revelatory anecdote during the post-film discussion. After dispensing the usual liberal platitude about how he only seeks to condemn Christian “extremists” the way that only a handful of Muslim “extremists” deserve ire, he spoke of a situation which has repeated itself in his life: sometimes during a rough airplane take-off or landing, he prays to God for a safe flight. He spoke of this somewhat embarrassed, as a lingering remainder of his Catholic upbringing. The story’s punchline was that his wife, an Atheist, always mocks him for asking “Santa Claus” for help just because he was scared. The crowd at the New Beverly – who all paid $20 for the privilege of this screening – laughed whole-heartedly.
So there you have it. Red State is a film designed to please intolerant liberal elitists like his wife, who hate Christianity on a level the semi-Catholic Smith can only half-heartedly gesture towards. The result is a pot-fueled disjointed stream of consciousness which becomes an action flick about Waco before your very eyes as the director realizes he doesn’t hate Christians all that much – even the crazy Christians who only exist in movies like this one.
Better luck next time, Kevin. You’ve purported your next film we know how that turned out, don’t we?
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