Frailty
Faith of Our Fathers
As it happens, Frailty is the second movie in as many weeks that takes place on my home turf. (The second is The Rookie, set in part in The Ballpark in Arlington.) Most of the movie is set in 1979, when I was ten years old, and the movie’s protagonist is ten years old, too. The movie is set in a North Texas town not too different from where I grew up (although, according to the IMDb, the movie was filmed in California). Consequently, everything about the look and feel of the movie seems is completely familiar to me. I remember what it was like growing up at that time, in that place; the beat-up El Camino with Texas plates, the TV dinners in aluminum foil carapaces, the East Texas pine trees, the plastic glasses with the pebbly surface, the typefaces of the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star Telegram. The young protagonist has in his bedroom the exact same “Dallas Cowboys - World Champions” pennant that I had in my bedroom in 1979. Bill Paxton’s character has an angel-shaped trophy in his bedroom that looks almost exactly like the one that I won in middle school for essay-writing. For me, these minor details are much more chilling, in their way, than any of the horrifying kidnappings and cold-blooded murders that take place in Frailty.
What is different, of course, is the moral landscape. The plastic trophy in Paxton’s room begins to speak to him, taking the form of an angelic vision. Paxton emerges from this vision with the clarity, certainty, and insanity that is the mark of the true fanatic. The vision, we are told, provides a list of demons in human shape that walk among us — indistinguishable from everyday humanity — and that must perforce be destroyed with a brace of magical weapons, including a vicious-looking ax.
The twist here is that Paxton is so crazy (and, contrariwise, so convinced that he is not crazy) that he drags his two children along into this belief system. Fenton (age 10) and Adam (age 7) are awoken from a sound sleep in the lonely hours of the night and informed that they must join their father in the good work of destroying demons. Adam is enthusiastic, enough so that he comes up with his own list (in crayon) of demons that includes a schoolyard bully. Fenton is dismissive and skeptical, and then increasingly horrified and fearful as the body count begins to ramp up.
Frailty would like to be many things that it is not. It would like, one suspects, to be a blood-and-gore horror movie, but it doesn’t (pardon the pun) seem to have the guts to do so. The camera pulls away from the ax every time it falls, and only hints at the dismemberment that follows. It would like to be a film noir, especially in the scenes where FBI agent Powers Boothe confronts Matthew McConaughey as one of the grown-up children (imagine, if you will, what the support group meetings of the Adult Children of Serial Killers are like), but it flubs the required grotesque twist ending. Similarly, the 1979 scenes aspire to a Southern Gothic transcendence, but don’t quite reach that level; the family setting seems entirely too normal, despite the killings, for one thing. (A real Southern Gothic religious ax murderer would be singing “Bringing in the Sheaves,” not “Onward Christian Soldiers,” while chopping up bodies, don’t you know.) It boasts a few dark comedy moments — especially the scene where Paxton tells his son he’s proud of his dungeon-digging efforts — but not nearly enough.
Frailty works best as a dark moral fable about parenting. Paxton (who also directs) is an archetypical blue-collar Southern father who wants to pass on a legacy of persistence and hard work and love. But his madness changes and warps that legacy, turns it into something evil and sinister. That Paxton is a loving and caring father makes things much worse. Frailty is fundamentally about the faith of our fathers, and how that faith is handed down from father to son, and what can happen if that frail faith is broken.