Movie: Down in the Valley

A reverent mixture of Taxi Driver & Badlands, with maybe a dash of Shadow of a Doubt (although I never really saw that movie all the way through for some reason). Norton's performance is incandescent and the script holds its own for almost 2/3 of the movie. Unfortunately, aside from the father's (David Morse) great volatile performance, the casting falls down. The girl is bland and her kid brother seems to have been cast for his value as a still. He looks the malnourished alienated representative kid, but in his effort to portray it through his behaviour he's just directionless at best and at worst embarrassingly phoney. To wit, the moment when he discovers the gun and the blood on the bed--it's as if he's a silent film actor being yelled out off screen to do each little thing--caress the gun, look worried, look up, look shocked... Norton just throws off such a captivating performance that it would seem that as foils these nonactors need only respond and revere him, but it just doesn't play out that way--they're so bad they detract, and the end of the film when they strew his ashes in mourning despite the damage he's done them simply doesn't play. The last 3rd of the movie hews just to suspense formula and everything interesting bleeds out of the movie. The moment of Norton's shooting the girl, shot on him, just hearing her wheezing, was very effective, but that kind of marked the end of the movie being worth watching. All in all, the movie betrays its laid on concept, about our ambiguous relationship to illusion as a response to this alienating world we now live in, at the expense of the life of the characters. It loses its speficity and lets itself be quashed by plot, and Hollywood plot at that. It's too afraid to be rough and true as Norton's character would have it be, were he the filmmaker, psychotic as that might seem. But that's what Cassavetes did, and that's what gives life to a film. The film couldn't have done much poorer box office; they should have gone for broke. Casting Bruce Dern shows they were onto it, but lost their nerve.