A Southwestern American pastoral of dormant menace, The King is a film of triple-dipped mood that turns on an act of shocking violence but still retains a significant emotional distance. Sharing the hypnotic quietude of movies like In the Bedroom, Monster’s Ball and All the Real Girls, it is subtly acted and put together of a piece, but also a movie that seems to substitute willful indistinctness for insight.



Granted leave after three years in the Navy, Elvis Valderez (Gael Garcia Bernal) quickly blows through his last paycheck, treating himself to a hooker and buying a used car before settling in Corpus Christi, Texas. There, he tracks down the man who impregnated his mother decades earlier: David Sandow (William Hurt), now a Baptist minister with a wife, Twyla (Mulholland Drive’s Laura Harring), and two teenage children, Paul (Paul Dano) and Malerie (Pell James, above right). David tacitly acknowledges the validity of Elvis’ claim, and even talks with his wife about it, but keeps things a secret from his children, in an effort to shut out a reminder of the sinful life he led before being saved.

Elvis, meanwhile, gets a job at a local pizza parlor, and strikes up a relationship with the naïve Malerie. Pushed into a corner when Paul threatens to expose what he believes to be a rebellious romantic fling on the part of his sister, Elvis lashes out, in what might best be described as Single White Male fashion. Confession and recrimination ensue, with David even repenting before his congregation and introducing Elvis to them, but more murky tragedy follows.

In his feature debut, documentary filmmaker James Marsh (Troubleman, Wisconsin Death Trip) elicits nice, subtle work from his cast, particularly Dano and James. Co-written with Milo Addica (himself a co-writer on Monster’s Ball and Birth), the film also makes important use of music, through Max Avery Lichtenstein’s score, Budd Carr’s musical selections and the character of Paul, who plays religious-inspired tunes on the electric guitar as warm-up for his father’s sermons. Hurt, meanwhile, is gently mesmerizing as a truly changed and reinvented man, a nice contrast from the serene but flippantly theatrical, zonked-out brilliance of his turn in A History of Violence.

Still, the film overall feels like more than a bit of a cheat. The King means to stand as a muted, somewhat archetypal tale of sin, redemption and retribution, but its interactions and consequences are too delicately arranged by half. Malerie falls under Elvis’ sway not because he’s a rakish charmer or for any other good reason, but because… he has a beat-up old car? Really, this is the cliché we’re trotting out? Elvis, meanwhile, is a complete enigma. Bernal effectively tamps down the considerable wattage of his mischievous smile, but there’s nothing about the character, as written, that illuminates the intent behind his actions. If Elvis were either a case study of malevolent disregard or acting out of some deeply seated, wholly subconscious impulse, that would be fine, but Marsh and Addica saddle him with a slew of weird, and weirdly timed, admissions, and he thus comes across as an amazingly arbitrary central figure.

Equally damning, especially for general audiences, is The King’s steadfast adherence to flattened effect. Even as tension within the narrative mounts in the aftermath of Elvis’ true identity being revealed to Malerie, the film doesn’t really convey the tautness and anxiety of this situation. With characters and entire sequences so underplayed, one has plenty of time to dote on incongruous details, like the lack of follow-through on David’s part after issuing an edict to Malerie not to see Elvis. There’s some good work in the surrounding details, but The King is too uncertain and vague. (THINKFilm, R, 105 mins.)