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.

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.)

Cars,
long a passion project of company CEO John Lasseter, who here jumps back behind
the “camera” and directs for the first time since 1999’s Toy Story 2. The tale of a hotshot rookie race car who discovers
the value of friendship and life in the slow lane when he’s stranded in a small
desert town en route to an important race, the colorful movie should be an
off-the-line commercial smash, but its bloated running time and somewhat
abstractly sentimental tenor might mitigate youthful enjoyment, particularly of
the repeat viewing variety.

Owen Wilson voices Lightning McQueen, a self-centered,
high-performance sports car gunning for the coveted Piston Cup. (A quick word
about Cars’ characters: while all are
anthropomorphized and imbued with their own personality traits, the film is
additionally, somewhat unnervingly, devoid of all humans. Autos drive
themselves, and the racing pit crews are manned by other vehicles, etc.) With
the esteemed King (voiced by Richard Petty) retiring, glory-hound Lightning
also sees this as his opportunity to wrest important sponsorship dollars away
from perennial runner-up Chick Hicks (voiced by Michael Keaton). After a
photo-finish tie in the race that opens the movie, a special run-off across the
country in California is
announced.

An accident along the way shakes Lightning free from his
trailer, and — since race cars don’t have headlights — he finds himself lost.
His situation becomes a more fixed detour when, after a high-speed chase that
tears up the sleepy, abandoned town of Radiator Springs, Lightning is sentenced
by Doc Hudson (voiced by Paul Newman), himself secretly an old race car, to fix
up and re-pave the streets he has damaged. Resentful at first, and panicked to
get to California as quickly as possible, Lightning slowly comes to appreciate
the town’s denizens, including local attorney Sally Carrera (voiced by Bonnie
Hunt), a curvaceous Porsche; sociable tow truck Mater (voiced by Larry the
Cable Guy); and emotional tire shop owner Luigi (voiced by Tony Shalhoub), a
1959 Italian Fiat.

As is typical of Pixar’s efforts, the animation on display
in Cars is jaw-droppingly impressive,
approaching photorealism at times. Even more astutely, those who have traversed
I-40 or the old Route 66 on cross-country drives will likely recognize specific
landmarks and geographical formations. This attention to intricate detail
elevates the material and helps rescue a few passages that might otherwise be
characterized as dramatically inert. The characters, too, grow on you. While it
takes some getting used to the imposition of human eyes and lids on windshields
— and the absence of humans seems a bit too Christine,
and never fully explained — the various collisions of personality that the
movie draws out make for some fun scenes.

Where Cars bogs
down some is in its too-brawny opening (all dialed-up sound mix) and pointedly
nostalgic but somewhat malingering efforts to play up the then-versus-now
changes in lifestyle (can we retire for a bit the obligatory montage with a
Randy Newman song?). Amidst a competitive animated slate this season —
including the underrated Over the
Hedge, as well as the forthcoming Monster House and The Ant
Bully — Cars could find its
grosses stalled around or significantly under the $260 million domestic take of
The Incredibles. Its G rating,
compared to that film’s PG, will help, but the sort of blockbuster haul of Finding Nemo (which pulled in $340 million)
looks unlikely, in part because the lessons learned in Cars play more to adult sensibilities.

Ranking somewhat to the low end of Pixar’s body of work is
no great shame, given the quality of that canon. But that’s the reality of
comparison. The world of Cars feels
less lively, spry and inherently interesting than the worlds of the Toy Story movies, even though it’s just
as lovingly sketched and populated. (Disney/Pixar, G, 116
mins.)