SALON

Saturday, Oct 15, 2011 12:00 AM UTC

“Texas Killing Fields”: A murky cop thriller from Michael Mann’s daughter

Sam Worthington and Jessica Chastain head a terrific cast in the gloomy "Texas Killing Fields"

By

Topics: Movies, Thrillers, Texas Killing Fields,

Atmospheric and creepy, with several strong acting performances and an overdose of hard-boiled angst, the serial-killer drama “Texas Killing Fields” is clearly the work of a raw but talented young director. In this case that director comes with a recognizable last name and a whole bunch of connections: Ami Canaan Mann is the daughter of Hollywood heavyweight Michael Mann (“Miami Vice,” “The Insider,” “Heat,” et al.), who serves as her principal producer here. The younger Mann has been trying to develop her own filmmaking career for at least a decade; she made the little-seen feature “Morning” in 2001, and has directed several TV episodes. If “Texas Killing Fields” is something short of a breakthrough, it’s an intriguingly murky B-movie that should satisfy genre buffs.

Don Ferrarone’s screenplay takes a few shreds of real-life superstition about the bayous of south Texas and spins them into a Gothic fable about an uneasy triangle of violent cops, a troubled little girl, a bunch of inbred backwoods yokels and a string of unsolved murders. Mike Souder (Anglo-Aussie hunk Sam Worthington) is a hard-ass local boy and cop’s kid, while his partner in the Texas City P.D. is an exiled New Yorker and haunted family man named Brian Heigh (the underappreciated Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who steals the show). Jessica Chastain plays Pam Stall, a pint-sized detective from a neighboring jurisdiction who favors tight designer jeans and punching out lowlifes, and who used to be married to Souder, with results that were apparently unpleasant for all.

There’s a whole lot of slow-burn resentment between these people, a bunch of swearing and drinking, a lot of shots of flat Texas roads and snaggle-treed swamps in the rain (cinematography by Stuart Dryburgh), and then every so often a mutilated woman turns up in the bayou. The detectives make charts on the walls and interview suspects and all that, but the plot is really tough to follow and then anyway the killer turns out to be who you thought it was all along. Chloë Grace Moretz, the teen actress who’s suddenly in every movie, plays Little Anne, a vulnerable, stringy-haired kid who lives in the Worst Family Home of All Time; to describe her mother as a hooker would be an excessively polite euphemism. We’re pretty much just waiting for the moment when the bad guys kidnap her and take her to their secret torture lair so Souder and Heigh can come out and look for her all by themselves, with no backup and no cell phones.

If the movie as a whole doesn’t make a lot of sense, it’s enjoyable to watch, and Mann has plenty of chops when it comes to weird little set-pieces and outrageous supporting characters. Worthington should have worked on his Texas accent a little harder (I noticed two or three spots where it slips), and Chastain doesn’t have much to do except kick ass and look cute. It’s Morgan who has the brooding, haunted, middle-aged guy thing on a low boil; I’m sorry to say this, but he’s fully a character from a Michael Mann movie. There are great tiny bits from Sheryl Lee as Little Anne’s slutty mom, Annabeth Gish as Heigh’s wife and Jason Clarke and Jon Eyez as a truly terrifying salt-and-pepper criminal duo. Ami Mann works well with actors and captures these downscale, threatening locations with grit and veracity. Next time around, she might be better off avoiding her dad’s propensity for mythic or symbolic subtext and working on basic storytelling.

Andrew O

More Andrew O'Hehir.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 2 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Loaded terminology like "entitlements" and "welfare" skews the debate and alters America. How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government.
298 points299 points | 64 comments
vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
260 points261 points | 10 comments
vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the persecuted late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
201 points202 points | 1 comment
vote
Obstruction will ruin the GOP: Playing politics and abusing the system can excite the extremes, but it's a recipe for long-term political disaster
55 points56 points | 8 comments
vote
How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government -- "...much of the U.S. economic security support system consists of subsidies for the affluent in the form of tax breaks, like those for private retirement savings plans such as 401(k)s and private employer-provided health insurance."
46 points47 points | 3 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations