Cult Cinema: Chrystal (2004) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of First Look Media

The films of actor-writer-producer-director Ray McKinnon, that familiar face when you need a quirky Southerner with a thick rimmed Georgian accent, have gained renewed interest recently thanks to Lightyear Entertainment’s digital restorations and rereleases of the Academy Award winning short film The Accountant and the 2007 screwball Southern comedy Randy & the Mob.  An original screen talent both in front of and behind the camera with a distinctive Southern Gothic flavor who more than paved the way for his co-star Walton Goggins’ career ascension, McKinnon has remained prolific in the film world as an actor and sometimes television director but his directorial tenure of features seems to have dried up with Randy & the Mob.  A shame as McKinnon’s films absolutely represent a far more authentic and palpably lived-in visions of the Deep South than most Hollywood or even independent regional productions have been able to get at. 

 
In between his Oscar winning short and his presently final theatrical feature film, Ray McKinnon and his wife, co-producer and creative partner Lisa Blount in conjunction with Walton Goggins joined forces for ostensibly McKinnon’s first feature film effort with the hard-hitting Southern Gothic drama Chrystal.  Coasting on the star power of Billy Bob Thortnon, himself a staple of the Deep South in films like Sling Blade and Monster’s Ball which Chrystal seems to have the most in common with, its a thoroughly dour, rough and sometimes gritty exercise in Southern Gothic and the small-town character driven backwoods drama.  Produced McKinnon’s production company Ginny Mule Pictures, it all but completely does away with the surreal tongue-in-cheek humor in The Accountant and instead starts off in a kind of woodsy Southern purgatory not too far off from the grounds trampled upon by The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia.

 
In Arkansas one night, a married man named Joe (Billy Bob Thornton) and his wife Chrystal (Lisa Blount) and young son are driving home one night down the mountain roads when he finds himself fleeing a high-speed police chase.  Losing control of the car, he rolls it over down a hill and crashes into a tree, leaving Chrystal with a permanent neck injury while catapulting their son through the windshield to his death.  Following a sixteen-year prison sentence, Joe returns home to find Chrystal never signed the divorce papers and has become a partially mobile quadriplegic who whiles away her time letting random young men take turns having sex with her.  Amid her self-loathing and wallow in carnality, her mother Gladys (Grace Zabriskie) reenters her life fending off the return of Joe into Chrystal’s fragile sphere meanwhile Snake (Ray McKinnon) a local crank-snorting hillbilly aims to settle a longstanding score with Joe.  All the while Chrystal herself isn’t sure whether or not to accept Joe back into her life given the tremendous damage and pain he has inflicted upon her.  Does Joe have a shot at redemption for his own criminal past or, with the help of Snake and Larry (Walton Goggins), will he backslide into destructive and dangerous old habits including but not limited to drug dealing and brandishing firearms.

 
Featuring not one but two David Lynch players, with Grace Zabriskie donning a Southern accent and being a pillar of support to Lisa Blount’s titular heroine and an acoustic guitar playing cameo by the late and legendary Harry Dean Stanton including a somber original score by Stephen Trask amid needle drops by Jay Farrar, Tim Eriksen and the Drive-By Truckers, Ray McKinnon’s Chrystal takes audiences through some pretty dire places in the Deep South.  From Capote and Lars and the Real Girl cinematographer Adam Kimmel’s woodsy amber lit camerawork to set pieces that look found rather than dressed, Chrystal starts out heavy and relentlessly chips away at our defenses until we’re left as frail and fragile as the woman herself.  At once a small-town American drama, a scenic regard for the Ozark Mountains, a travelogue through dingy slummy bars and backwoods lots with parked cars and men lined up outside of them, McKinnon’s film gives us a far more understated and perhaps realistically unremarkable portrait of Southern pain than Monster’s Ball which, for all of its powerful performances and emotions, somehow feels less regionally authentic than this. 

 
Playing at Sundance in the winter of 2004 followed by a limited theatrical release the following year and a home video DVD release through First Look Entertainment which also for at time had an exclusive deal with Blockbuster Video, Chrystal didn’t make too much noise originally though Lisa Blount won the Best Actress award at the Stockholm Film Festival for it.  Ray McKinnon was also nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.  Though critically revered, the microbudget regional film didn’t take in much more than $80,000 during its initial run.  Despite this, the film was a critical darling including some strong endorsements coming from Henry Rollins on the DVD cover and thanks to renewed interest in the works of Ray McKinnon, there’s ample room for this to garner a newfound audience.  I myself probably wouldn’t have thought to check this out were it not for the studious efforts of Lightyear Entertainment and their rerelease of The Accountant which in hindsight is still McKinnon at his best in front of and behind the camera.  Not as raw as the aforementioned Monster’s Ball but perhaps the truer of the two?

--Andrew Kotwicki