The structure has changed! Now, in the Class of … series, Nick Rogers takes a monthly look back at films celebrating their 20th, 30th or 40th anniversary of initial release this year — five from 1983, four from 1993 and four from 2003. The self-imposed rules of the column remain the same: No films with an Oscar nomination and no films among their year’s top-10 box-office grossers.
Flesh and Bone opens on a tolling bell, discordant strings and a ragged-serif opening-credits font resembling that which was likely etched onto many a makeshift 19th-century tombstone. As such, writer-director Steve Kloves’ film would seem to promise a textbook Southern Gothic scorcher — long-repressed emotions that approach critical temperatures under a blazing sun in the dust-choked, dead-ended desolation of backwater Texas before erupting in carnal, violent and irreversible expressions of lust, wrath and retribution.
That technically transpires, but Kloves prefers to let his pot simmer rather than boil. Instead, Flesh and Bone portrays something more poignant (and, admittedly, more pokey) than prurient: It’s a character study that emphasizes everyday evolutionary adaptations to survive, showcasing four people who have shoved together whatever stray puzzle pieces they can find into a picture of their lives. A blotchy, blurry run of color and shape to everyone else, clarity for them.
When he wasn’t admitted into UCLA’s film school during his third year at the university, Kloves dropped out and took a job as an unpaid intern at a Hollywood talent agency. There, he successfully pitched his first script, which became 1984’s Racing with the Moon, a coming-of-age story starring Sean Penn, Nicolas Cage and Elizabeth McGovern. It then took 16 more years to see three more of his scripts produced: 1989’s The Fabulous Baker Boys (which Kloves also directed), 1993’s Flesh and Bone and 2000’s Wonder Boys (for which he received an Oscar nomination). If Kloves’ name seems familiar, that’s because he rattled off twice as many screenplays over the ensuing 11 years — adapting every book in the Harry Potter franchise for the big screen save Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Kloves has also served as a producer on the Fantastic Beasts spinoffs from the Harry Potter universe.
Flesh and Bone found Kloves returning to the roots of his native Texas. He tempers the readily obvious revelations of its plot with a sort of weary understanding about small-town life: Backroads can wind and bend for miles, but they almost always dump out at the same spot. You’ve got to go much farther than Arliss, Kay, Roy and Ginnie have to escape the oscillations and orbits that would pull them all together, in a story that begins and ends with condemnation.
No surprise, then, that such a tale would serve as a buffet for performers like Dennis Quaid (Arliss), Meg Ryan (Kay), James Caan (Roy) and, in her breakout role, Gwyneth Paltrow (Ginnie). With a pace that lets respective aches, ambitions and anxieties linger, each actor delivers a layered, engaging turn.
Flesh and Bone was also a hot-ticket Hollywood husband-and-wife project, arriving two years into the 10-year marriage of Quaid and Ryan, who previously met on the set of 1987’s Innerspace and remade D.O.A. together. Additionally, it sought to toss a little gravel into Ryan’s goody-two-shoes act, just months after its arguable apex in Sleepless in Seattle.
Kay is the classic small-town somebody who seemed destined for bigger things but got stuck over and over again. She’s married to a louse who leaves the TV on constantly, never cleans up and has resorted to selling their furniture for gambling money. Kay will take whatever someone’s willing to pay, even if it means amateur bachelor-party stripping. Even that ends with a puddle of vomit and no payout.
In the early going, Ryan perhaps tries a bit too hard to swerve in a different direction — exaggerating her big Texan accent for comic effect that feels too blustery. But any blasts of brassy-sassy comedy are quickly punctuated by sharp bursts of violence in Kay’s life, and Ryan lets little grace notes of resignation settle around Kay’s temples. There’s an entire decade of disappointment in the direction Ryan sends her eyes when she can’t sell the lie to her husband that she and Arliss have been sleeping together. Plus, the relaxed tempo of Flesh and Bone lets Ryan build Kay into a person unwilling to suffer further torment by the film’s end — no matter how sad walking away might make her feel. For someone itching to move, one foot in front of the other is all they really have.
To a lesser degree, Arliss is also a pivot for Quaid away from the wily raconteurs for whom he’d become known. Arliss has created a molehill empire of roadside machines that sell everything from pretzels to prophylactics — penny-ante purchases for primal impulses. At one location, condoms sell twice as well in the women’s restroom as the men’s restroom. And the “exotics” listed on his jalopy truck? Those would be the red-, green- and blue-dyed chickens that “answer people’s questions.” Arliss’s life is a trail of hotel rooms with the occasional waitress tryst.
Quaid has long used his iconically wide, toothy smile to sell his shenanigans to the audience. If Arliss turns his mouth upward at all, it’s in a courteous grin — a sign that lets you know he’s always listening but never letting on what he’s really thinking. Arliss is a stockier, stubbier and sadder person than the characters Quaid had inhabited to that point, and it’s the introduction of a more reticent, reflective side he’d show in works like Frequency and 2002’s The Rookie.
Arliss meets Kay after her disastrous attempt at stripping. At the suggestion that he fulfill his good-deed quotient for the day, Arliss lets Kay sleep things off in his hotel room. She needs a bus back to Bayview, Texas, but lacks the time (or the money, really) for such a thing. So Arliss offers to drive her while he’s there looking into the acquisition of more roadside novelties. (Kloves has a lot of fun fleshing out the deals, details and deceptions inherent to the novelty industry and, through inimitable character actor Scott Wilson, the desperate souls it attracts.)
After a confrontation with Kay’s husband, Arliss decides to introduce Kay to his itinerant lifestyle. He visits the same towns, uses the same beds, eats the same foods, sees the same women. Arliss has rendered himself rigorously unlovable. He doesn’t like any surprises. Conversation? “I figure people share what they want to,” Arliss says. “No sense crowdin’ ’em.”
You sense Arliss has a lifetime’s worth of empty words intended to fill space from his father, Roy — a thief whom we meet, alongside a much younger Arliss, in a prologue that ends in a bloody hail of gunfire and dead bodies. And it’s clear Arliss has made do with a meager living as some sort of self-inflicted penalty for the felonies into which Roy once forced him, as if he feels he’s unworthy of enjoying life too much. We don’t know how long Arliss stuck around after that fateful night. Neither do we see his escape from Roy’s thumb. That’s because it still presses on him. When Arliss gets word of an old man asking about him … well, that’s why Arliss is in Bayview.
The father and child reunion occurs after Roy’s latest mishap, which gives him a back full of birdshot Arliss must pluck from his father’s flesh.
Roy has also taken up with Ginnie, a barely legal entry-level grifter who’s not above greasing a corpse’s finger to gaffle a ring she can pawn. She’s the latest in a long line of cast-off partners for Roy, and Paltrow (only 20 at the time) plays an excellent shell game with Roy, Arliss and Kay. A lesser movie would minimize Ginnie’s menace and mettle, but Paltrow’s lanky physicality masks her own predatory instincts. Roy has been lucky, but Roy is also old. If his eventual clash with Arliss doesn’t kill him, well … down the road, Ginnie might have some say in such a matter.
The late Caan was only 14 years older than Quaid, but you absolutely buy him as the senior here — even beyond extra graying and enhancing his crags and crow’s feet. Caan’s résumé is littered with cocky hotheads and charming rule-breakers, but few of them have been such stone-cold losers like Roy — a guy who probably sat in slack-jawed awe by the work of Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter and took away all the wrong lessons.
It would be easy for Caan to gobble all the scenery, and he does on occasion, but he also lets Roy express a latent lament for the wholesale slaughter seen in the prologue. Roy has certainly killed before and since. This was perhaps the only time even he felt he went a bit too far. As Roy fabricates a falsehood to Ginnie about what happened that night, Caan shows you the panic of someone breathlessly laboring to stay one step ahead of the demons that plague him. At the same time, only one thing can put him down and that’s not a breakfast bottle of George Dickel. “You know how I feel about loose ends,” Roy tells Arliss. “Being one myself,” Arliss fires back.
So, four great characters and four strong performances. Where does Kloves take them? Exactly where you expect. To be fair, Flesh and Bone is never out to surprise you. Unless you take joy in recognizing plot turns that the perilously myopic characters caught up in them cannot see, there’s no back-patting reward to predict where this is headed. And while the patience of its malevolence is part of its point, Kloves’ film is perhaps a bit too patient. Flesh and Bone would have made a great novel, with juicy digressions into the internal mechanics of Arliss, Kay, Roy and Ginnie. As a film, it’s limited in the sense that there’s only so much we can learn about them without such switchbacks and detours. We know all we need to know about this quartet by the 90-minute mark, with only an inevitable conclusion left to play out over the remaining half-hour. (At least the finale takes place in an abandoned home that appears to have been spat back up by the earth when its taste was too bitter to swallow.)
Still, Flesh and Bone is carried by its authenticity about the foothold of Shiners and shiners in this slice of America, a staunch swerve away from the sentimental feeling that love conquers all, and the notion that, for some, terrible deeds aren’t rooted in dislike or malice but muscle memory. It’s still the cornerstones of Southern Gothic, just with New Testament patience and Old Testament penance.