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The King
By the time we meet Pastor David Sandow (William Hurt), he is a doomed man. The King chronicles his complete and utter decent into the inescapable consequences of long-repressed depravity. In the final shot of the film, perhaps he finally realizes the amount of trouble that he is in, but we don’t get to stick around and see the repercussions. The film concerns his impending fate, not his fall. It is about the very moment before he knows he is finished forever, when his secret sins catch up with him and there is no escaping from their skeletons. The instigator of this fall comes in the form an illegitimate son, conceived before Sandow’s conversion to Christianity when he “changed his ways.” Sandow is now an established Evangelical preacher and has a respectable family that has followed suite; his legitimate son Paul (Paul Dano) leads the church’s praise band, and his wife and daughter (Laura Harring and Pell James) are silent, subservient women of the church who look on with reverence and awe at the charismatic men in their lives. Into this circle drifts Elvis Valderez, fresh from the military and ready to reclaim his estranged father as his own. He is played by Gael García Bernal in a performance that is near impossible to penetrate. Does he intentionally mean to bring the downfall of his father and his family, or is it a gradual process based on Sandow’s hesitancy to welcome him into his home? We’re never sure; the only clue provided to us is the film’s title, which indicates that Elvis represents divine punishment against a man of the cloth who would rather forget his sins than face them. He speaks for the King who Sandow claims to worship. Vengeance is Mine indeed, and any other motivations from Elvis are murky. But Elvis is not required to be clear. The film is really about Sandow and his lonely road to damnation. It must first be understood that Sandow is for the most part an honest man; he not the Elmer Gantry-type of preacher who churns out sermons for money and then skips town. He pastors a respectable church and sincerely believes that he has been “saved by the Lord.” William Hurt plays him as a good if emotionally withdrawn fellow who has found a faith that provided an escape from his past, and now he hopes that the past has indeed deserted him. But his conversion doesn’t make his problems go away: He seeks (and this distinction is key) flight from his sins, not forgiveness, and this eventually proves to be his fatal flaw. I will refer you the myth of Jonah, a good man whose simultaneous claims of priesthood and flight from his holy responsibilities finally led him to be swallowed by a whale. Elvis is Sandow’s whale; he is the ghost-like echo that forces the pastor into accounting for his actions in a way not unlike the bloodthirsty tales of family revenge found in the Old Testament dating all the way back to Cain and Able. If, as you watch the film, you find yourself repulsed by its quick bursts of strong violence or rather lengthy meditations on sexual infidelity, I will only point you to the books of Kings (hmmm) and Chronicles in the Bible for further examples of such graphic escapades. The King is biblical in every sense of the word, especially as we begin to understand Elvis’ role less as a character and more as the idea of past sins returning to remind the good pastor that even the men of the sincerest conversions must still be held accountable for their actions. I will not reveal anything more of The King’s plot. It is enough to know that Sandow is doomed, and Elvis is the perpetrator of the downfall. The film isn’t really about its plot anyway, but about the two men pitted against one another who watch the film’s story topple down around them as evil sets in. Director/co-writer James Marsh has a natural gift for allowing his camera to do most of the talking instead of the script, which is basically a series of interactions between the family members as they cope with Elvis’ presence in their lives. I particularly appreciate the way Marsh films Bernal, giving him long close-ups when he interacts with various members of Sandow’s family but always editing quickly around his face when he is by himself, making it difficult to clearly understand the man during his quiet moments. We thus only really get a good look at him when he is acting, which isn’t a good look at all. There is a moment midway through the film where Elvis and a clown quietly pass one another on a bridge, and it’s a masterful use of simplistic close-ups. Elvis and the clown’s expressions are curious as they stare one another down, inquisitive without being nosy. This brief, silent interaction might contain the heart of the entire movie: Elvis is essentially God’s clown, putting on a performance as a prosecutor representing a divine case against Sandow. He cannot help the mask he wears, so he simply rises to its occasion. A clown can only do what a clown does, after all. But then, everyone is performing with some sort of mask here. Sandow unquestionably has a murky past, but we have a feeling that the rest of his family is not far from descending into hypocrisy. Paul is one of those fiery Christian teenagers who plays in a Christian band, leads school prayers, and advocates for Intelligent Design curriculum at school boards, but these convictions seem fueled more from an idolization of his father than a devotion to Jesus. Malerie, the daughter, is so passively seduced by her callers that we wonder if she hasn’t done this before and if it isn’t partly because of her boredom with her strict Christian upbringing. Even Twyla, Sandow’s dedicated wife, seems to participate in a marriage fueled by certain conditions—watch carefully the crucial scene between her and Elvis, and you see a woman clearly more loyal to her children than to her husband. So all the major players are clowns as they act out strict religious dogma that disguises their true natures. As a portrait of a strict, religious family, The King is not kind; I’m not sure it is a direct assault on evangelical fundamentalism, which is certainly the doctrine that Sandow and his family follow, but it does suggest how easy it is to lose yourself in such a disciplined series of rules and regulations that make it all but impossible not to repress some inherent traits in our nature (sexuality, doubts, teenage rebellion, etc.). Perhaps this is Marsh’s ultimate point—that those who choose to turn to religion should take care that it is a decision based on reason, not on desperation. Otherwise, religion doesn’t “save”—it only deceives. Recent sexual scandals from prominent fundamentalist spokesmen Mark Foley and Rev. Ted Haggard confirm this theory: Here were two of the most outspoken leaders of the Religious Right utterly defeated by the “sins” that they spent their lives speaking against. Even before they were “outed,” I couldn’t help but wonder as I watched these men if their passion wasn’t fueled by some deep-seeded rebellion going on inside of them. We can only speculate whether or not their conversions to fundamentalism were sincere (I suspect they were, at least on a superficial level), but their faith ultimately only masked the secret identities that tortured them without allowing them to directly confront the real issues. The King was released before any of these scandals surfaced, and it’s amazing how utterly perceptive—and prophetic—it is. In a way, The King is the angrier little brother of Robert Duvall’s The Apostle, which celebrated fundamentalism while also suggesting that such tremendous faith requires a special sort of redemption that is accomplished beyond the normal precepts of civilized law—a notion with which Elvis would certainly agree, though not on the same terms. The Apostle told the story of a man who also loses himself in his religion, but in his case, his faith provided him with self-control over his three chief vices: alcohol, anger, and lust. We know that Sandow struggled at one point with lust, and his twitching eyes suggest that this was not his only addiction. But in his case, we get the feeling that faith hasn’t saved him from his weaknesses so much as it has allowed him to exchange one type of unhealthy extreme for another. It’s the same type of extremism that drove an alcoholic Timothy Treadwell into grizzly bear country with deadly results (see Grizzly Man); Sandow thinks his religion will save him, but it only serves to prolong his inevitable, horrible destiny. “I need to make peace with God.” That’s the last spoken line in the film, but I’m not giving anything away, because you’ll never predict the context in which it is chillingly spoken. What’s the most unsettling about this haunting little film is how this line lingers throughout on Sandow’s lips and eventually turns into a grotesque punch-line that forces him to reinterpret it’s meaning—and by then, it’s too late. Yes, he might have made peace with God, but his contract with the divine doesn’t stop there, nor do his obligations to it. His real concern should have been whether God has made peace with him. Cast: Lionsgate presents a FilmFour production. Directed by James Marsh. Written by Marsh and Milo Addica. Rated R, for strong sexuality involving teens and brief violence. Running time: 105 minutes. Original United States theatrical release date: May 5, 2006. Questions? Comments? E-mail me: danel_the_tinman@hotmail.com |
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