It's no surprise that when Karl befriends a young boy named Frank Wheatley (Lucas Black) at the laundromat, part of what attracts the boy to Karl is that voice. (It's the kind of voice I haven't heard since, as a kid, I hung around my grandfather's coal-mining buddies in West Virginia.) Equal parts gravel and hickory smoke, it's a sound that seems to emanate from a microphone planted deep in Thornton's chest. But part of what keeps Karl's character grounded, interestingly enough, is the deep and convincingly abrasive voice Thornton developed for the role. It's the kind of performance, full of hand-wringing and verbal tics, that could have become a cartoon. With his loping gait, his thrust-forward jaw, his oddly shaved head and his penchant for buttoning his blue work shirts up to the top button, Karl seems like an odd conflation of Forrest Gump and Pruitt Taylor Vince's shy, overweight pizza cook in last year's "Heavy." Here, however, he tucks himself down into a role that's all clean but muted chords. As anyone who saw his turn as the drug-dealing killer Ray in 1992's "One False Move" knows, Thornton is a big, rangy, in-your-face presence - he's James Carville re-imagined as a linebacker. It's Thornton's rough and nuanced performance as Karl, not his modest filmmaking skills, that sucks you so quickly into "Sling Blade's" vortex. When Karl is pushed out into the world, Thornton imbues the film's early scenes - of the lone man walking by the side of the road, or ordering French fries, or simply killing time outside a laundromat - with a lean and surprisingly poignant kind of dignity. He has no life on the outside, and he finds interaction with strangers almost unbearably complicated. Now that it's time to leave the asylum, however, Karl doesn't want to budge. "Some fellers asked me if I had it to do all over again, would I? I reckon I would." "I just seen red," he explains to a high school journalist who elicits his story. When his mother screamed that the bully was in fact her lover, Karl killed her as well. Stumbling upon his mother having rough sex with the town bully, and believing that she was being raped, he killed the man with a few sharp strokes of a sling blade. Abused as a child by fanatically religious parents, Karl was imprisoned for a youthful act of terrible vengeance. "Sling Blade" opens in an asylum for the criminally insane in Arkansas, where a mildly retarded man named Karl Childers - played by Thornton, who also wrote the film's screenplay - is about to be released after 25 years. It cuts as cleanly as any American movie I've witnessed in a while. As anyone who's held one knows, it takes a certain amount of rhythmic grace to wield a sling blade properly, and for its first hour, Thornton's film moves with just that kind of deft-but-easy motion. Billy Bob Thornton's directorial debut takes its title from a kind of scythe - a long, curved blade attached to a wooden handle, it's what you would use to knock down weeds along the side of a highway.
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