The Atmospheric 2001 Allegory Frailty Was a Triumph for Bill Paxton as an Actor and a First Time Filmmaker
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
On an episode devoted to QAnon, one of the hosts of Red-Handed, a British true crime podcast I am in the process of binging made the point that if you genuinely believe that an evil cabal of pedophilic Satanic cannibals are raping and eating children to stay young forever then it makes sense that members of the cult would want to take concrete action to fight what they literally see as a massive global conspiracy with its tentacles everywhere, but particularly in the highest reaches of Hollywood and the Democratic Party.
Within that context, there has been a shocking dearth of QAnon-inspired violence. After all, if hundreds of thousands, or even millions, or tens of millions believe that children are being trafficked and eaten on a historic global scale then it would seemingly follow that there would be a related epidemic of violent acts designed to sabotage this international child-diddling conspiracy of pure evil.
Yet the vast majority of QAnon adherents seem content to post memes comparing Donald Trump to Jesus and the Democrats as one big Satanic coven rather than killing congresspeople they find objectionable or bombing Democratic conventions.
I found myself thinking a lot about QAnon re-watching Bill Paxton’s 2001 masterpiece Frailty for the second or third time because it is a fascinating and eminently re-watchable fable of faith taken to murderous, homicidal extremes.
It’s a film about a man of unthinking faith convinced that God has a secret plan that only he can see that involves destroying demons that walk the planet looking and acting like ordinary human beings.
As history and various Holocausts have taught us again and again, you can do ANYTHING to an enemy that you do not see as fully human, or human at all. This includes killing.
The unforgettable hero/anti-hero/villain of Frailty does not see the people he slaughters with an axe as human beings with souls who can be killed and then mourned but rather demons without souls who must be struck down by a flaming sword of the Lord’s vengeance.
If that sounds crazy or deluded it is. But that can also be said of so much religious dogma around the world. After all, it was the Judeo-Christian God who ordered Abraham to prove his faith and his loyalty before Ashton Kutcher showed up mere seconds before the sacrificial killing was to occur to inform Abraham that he was on a special time-traveling episode of Punk’d and that he had been punked by God and the cast and crew of the popular MTV prank show.
In one of his best and deepest roles and performances, Paxton does double duty as Dad Meiks, a widower in 1979 Texas whose life revolves around his sons Adam (Jeremy Sumpter) and Fenton (Matt O’Leary).
The boys and their loving mechanic dad lead idyllic small town lives until their father receives a holy vision that changes all of their lives forever and send them individually and collectively on a dark path.
With heartbreaking earnestness and sincerity, Paxton’s murderous mechanic explains that there are demons who walk the earth unnoticed and that it is his sacred duty, and the sacred duty of his family, to destroy these demons before they can hurt more people and spread more evil.
He goes on to insist that God has given him a list of demons to destroy with one of three holy tools: a pair of gloves, an axe and a pipe. Now you may be thinking that that sounds more like rejected weapons from Clue but this is one of many times that something that could easily come off as unintentionally funny or ridiculous is instead tremendously powerful due to the absolute conviction that Paxton brings to the project as a wildly over-achieving director and actor.
Paxton plays his axe-murdering zealot as a man of absolute faith and belief who does not harbor an iota of doubt or skepticism about the task he sees laid out before him by God Himself.
Fenton, the older son, does not share his father’s feverish conviction that God wants him and his family to ignore that whole “Thou Shalt Not Kill” commandment and go on a divinely ordained killing spree.
There is some VERY good child acting in this motion picture.
He understandably thinks that his father has gone quite mad and found a unique excuse to take an axe to the necks and torsos of various strangers. The same is not true of Adam. Adam happily subscribes to his father’s feverish delusions of deadly, divine destiny both out of a genuine sense of belief and a desire to get closer to someone who was an excellent, involved dad before all the killings started.
Fenton seems to have inherited his father’s stubbornness, if not his faith. He is punished harshly for his lack of belief and his unwillingness to go along with his father’s newfangled religion before he finally breaks.
Frailty is told entirely in flashbacks. The film unfolds as a film-length confession by a wonderfully haunted Matthew McConaughey to FBI Agent Wesley Doyle (Powers Boothe) about his family’s secret life and the true identity of what law enforcement are calling the “God’s Hands Killer” because he sees himself as the Lord’s unblinking, unquestioning executioner.
Boothe has the seemingly thankless task of spending pretty much the entire film listening. A lesser actor might be blown away by the sad ferocity of Paxton and McConaughey’s performances but Boothe had such extraordinary presence that he can be riveting doing nothing more than sitting in a chair and hearing a story that begins bleak and grows darker by the moment.
Frailty works so well on an allegorical level that it almost seems a shame that it concludes with not one, not two, but three distinct twists that individually and collectively make it feel less like a powerful horror-drama about faith and family than a 99 minute episode of Tales from the Crypt.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing but the twists can’t help but cheapen what is otherwise boldly, brazenly sincere and oddly straightforward. If you don’t want the twists ruined stop reading now.
We’ve been led all film long to believe that McConaughey’s sad-eyed survivor is the older brother who lacked faith and refused to go along with his dad’s wacky plan when he is in fact the younger brother, and has just destroyed his older brother for being a demon.
That twist is followed by the cheesy revelation that Boothe’s FBI agent is a demon on the now grown-up Adam’s list for having murdered his own mother in cold blood. The final twist involves the disclosure that Adam isn’t just someone who played God’d policeman alongside his dear, departed, deadly dad; he’s an actual sheriff who has been killing with impunity for the same reasons his pops did.
Despite the excessive closing twists Frailty really holds up. It’s a brilliant piece of filmmaking with uniformly fine performances and a first time director in full control of his craft. The first time I saw Frailty, I was impressed. I thought even more highly of it when I wrote about it in the aftermath of Paxton’s shocking death and I flat out loved it this time around.
The older I get, the more comfort I get from watching the same movies over and over again. They’re comfort food for my frazzled brain even when they’re dark and tormented and choked with dread and death like Frailty.
I quite enjoyed this viewing and something tells me I’ll enjoy the next one just as much, if not more.
Check out my newest literary endeavor, The Joy of Trash: Flaming Garbage Fire Extended Edition at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop and get a free, signed "Weird Al” Yankovic-themed coloring book for free! Just 18.75, shipping and taxes included! Or, for just 25 dollars, you can get a hardcover “Joy of Positivity 2: The New Batch” edition signed (by Felipe and myself) and numbered (to 50) copy with a hand-written recommendation from me within its pages. It’s truly a one-of-a-kind collectible!
Or you can buy The Joy of Trash from Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Trash-Nathan-Definitive-Everything/dp/B09NR9NTB4/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= but why would you want to do that?
Check out my new Substack at https://nathanrabin.substack.com/
And we would love it if you would pledge to the site’s Patreon as well. https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace