Salon | "The Locusts"

M O V I E S
The Locusts
Written and
directed by
John Patrick Kelley
Starring Kate Capshaw,
Jeremy Davies,
Vince Vaughn
and Ashley Judd
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Southern Discomfort

BY ANDREW O'HEHIR | YOU WON'T MISTAKE John Patrick Kelley's debut feature, "The Locusts," for capital-A Art. It's a shamelessly lurid, old-fashioned yarn, set on a Kansas cattle ranch in the early '60s, and delivered about as delicately as an abattoir hammer-blow. Although it's obviously a tribute to an earlier cinematic era, "The Locusts" offers the viewer no self-conscious winks or knowing glances. There's nothing in this movie, thank God, to suggest that the filmmaker has ever heard of Alfred Hitchcock or Jean-Luc Godard (the mother and father, respectively, of nearly all contemporary cinema). If, like me, you lament the lost tradition of perfervid Hollywood melodrama, you'll find this tightly plotted and well-acted potboiler one of the great guilty pleasures of your moviegoing year, the cinematic equivalent to a slug of iced bourbon late on a sticky summer night.
Under the opening credits, after we watch a man on a country road, in deep focus, accept a ride in a pickup truck, Kelley's camera actually comes to rest on a spider in its web. I laughed out loud, partly because the symbolism is so hackneyed and partly because of the film's recklessness at venturing into the terrain of archetype, whence few movies emerge unscathed.
The real spider in "The Locusts" is of course Kate Capshaw as Mrs. Potts, the catty cattle tycoon, all shoulder blades, elbows, cigarettes, ice cubes and arachnoid hands. The fly spiraling inexorably into her web is Clay (Vince Vaughn), the hitchhiker from the opening scene, a T-shirt-and-jeans-clad beefcake drifter who we instantly understand is a Good Guy in Trouble. Of course we're not in Kansas anymore, and we never were. Instead we're in one of those vintage Southern Gothics starring Paul Newman, perhaps adapted from Faulkner or Tennessee Williams: a few dashes of "Hud" and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," a fair bit of "Sweet Bird of Youth" and rather too much, truth be told, of "The Long Hot Summer."
But who's complaining? Those were terrific movies, and if Kelley's is an homage at least it's a hell-for-leather homage. While the impassively handsome Vaughn is no Newman, he eventually locates a shiftiness and moodiness within Clay that increasingly make us wonder what the hell he's up to. As Kitty, his short-term girlfriend, asks him one fateful evening, "So now we're going to skip the sex part and go right to the brooding?" We can't help liking Clay, though; he's more the big-brother type than the rake, and he instinctively befriends the town's two vulnerable outsiders.
One of these is Kitty, portrayed by Ashley Judd as a remarkable combination of innocence and lasciviousness. (Now I understand what all the media fuss over Judd is about.) Whatever misogyny may be found in Kelley's creation of Mrs. Potts is paid for with interest here; rarely in mainstream film has a sexually promiscuous woman been presented so positively. Like his apparent idol Tennessee Williams, Kelley understands that being a slut is one of the few ways to establish an individual identity in small-town society.
But it's Clay's adoption of Flyboy, the Potts household's damaged son, that summons up the ranch's none-too-buried monsters. Flyboy was recently let out of the state hospital, where he'd been ever since his beloved dad hanged himself from a tree eight years earlier. As this stammering, scrawny near-autistic boy carrying tremendous need and anguish, Jeremy Davies -- for my money -- outdoes Billy Bob Thornton's vaunted performance in "Sling Blade." Clay gets Flyboy talking, tries to teach him how to dress and groom himself, tries to get him laid, convinces him to stand up to his mother. They both know they're up against a formidable opponent, but neither is quite ready for what Mrs. Potts and the resourceful Kelley have up their sleeves. (You actually might not guess the devilishly clever plot twists in advance -- a rarity these days.)
Flyboy recalls a poem that his late father, a biology teacher, used to recite in troubled moments: "Blessed are the locusts' lives/ For they are blessed with voiceless wives." Capshaw's performance may veer uncomfortably close to parody at moments, but there's no way to fault the sheer physicality of her work. Liquored up and fueled by tangible self-hatred, she prowls her domain like a demonic lioness, hungry for sex, death and sheer annihilation. In an outlandish climactic scene I promise you'll remember for the rest of your life, she staggers out into a driving rainstorm, wearing only a slip, in order to castrate a bull.
Is this hallucinatory stew of incest, madness, suicide and thunderstorms a remotely naturalistic portrait of Midwestern life 35 years ago? Of course not, but '60s Middle America is just as mythic to us now as the Athens of Aeschylus, and "The Locusts" plays itself out on the ominous, symbolically charged ground of myth. The first time Kelley uses the immortal Everly Brothers hit "Love Hurts" in the film, I thought he was cheating -- a song so packed with associations and memories, for most listeners, seems like a short-cut to atmosphere. But the second time you hear it, after Kelley's fable has played itself out, you listen to the lyrics behind those astonishing harmonies and hear the loneliness, the loss, the mythic American darkness that so many artists strive for and so few find.
SALON | Oct. 3, 1997
Andrew O'Hehir is a writer living in New York and a regular contributor to Salon.