Innocent Pushed Into Moral Dilemma In `Sling Blade'

----------------------------------------------------------------- Movie review

XXX 1/2 "Sling Blade," with Billy Bob Thornton, Dwight Yoakam, J.T. Walsh, John Ritter, Lucas Black, Natalie Canerday, Robert Duvall. Written and directed by Thornton. Varsity. "R" - Restricted because of violence, language. -----------------------------------------------------------------

Miramax Pictures is expecting big things of this little picture when the Academy Award nominations are announced Tuesday morning. Indeed, the company recently moved up the local release date two weeks because the momentum for "Sling Blade" seems to be building.

The picture is almost entirely the creation of B-movie supporting actor and occasional screenplay collaborator Billy Bob Thornton, an Arkansas native who this time takes on three firsts: directing, playing the lead and writing a screenplay by himself. He does a remarkable job in all three categories, but what you're likely to remember most clearly is his performance.

Unrecognizable as the killers and goons he often plays, Thornton has cast himself as Karl Childers, a slow-witted man who has spent the past 25 years in an Arkansas asylum for the criminally insane. There's no question that as a child he did kill his mother and her bullying lover; also there's no question that he is a victim of what Thornton calls "the wrong Bible."

Raised and abused by fanatically religious parents who thought his birth was God's punishment, Karl committed the killings out of a sense of righteousness. As the movie opens, he's released and reluctantly heads home.

Karl takes a job as a mechanic, befriends a fatherless boy, Frank (Lucas Black), and moves in with him and his mother, Linda (Natalie Canerday). Too bad she has a redneck boyfriend, Doyle (Dwight Yoakam), who makes life hell for all three of them. Only the mother's gay friend, Vaughan (John Ritter), stands up to Doyle, and he encourages Karl to save the family from Doyle's increasingly reckless behavior.

Occasionally reminiscent of Boo Radley and Forrest Gump, Karl is nevertheless an original. Thornton has been working on the character for more than a decade now, mostly in a one-man stage show, and he's astonishingly successful at suggesting how Karl thinks, what weight he gives to every piece of relevant information he's given, and how he's misunderstood.

"All right then" takes on a special meaning when Karl says it. So do the "um-ums" that follow every declaration, and the occasional, understated admissions of abuse ("They used to make quite a bit of sport of me").

The script eventually pushes Karl into the same kind of moral dilemma faced by the boy hostage who befriends Kevin Costner in Clint Eastwood's "A Perfect World." They're both innocents who come to terms with a solution that's as inevitable as it is socially unacceptable.

As a writer-director, Thornton never allows Karl to become the whole show. He does wonders with Yoakam, who could have played a standard villain but always manages to suggest a man trapped within his prejudices (their final scene together may be predictable, but what happens between the two actors is utterly unexpected). You may not buy the idea that the boy and his mother would so quickly allow a potentially dangerous stranger into their home, but Black and Canerday are emotionally needy enough to demonstrate why.

Vaughan is, like Karl, someone we've never really seen before in movies, and Ritter rises to the occasion with the most accomplished and deglamorized performance of his big-screen career. Thornton's friends, Robert Duvall and Jim Jarmusch, turn up in cameos, and their appearances add up to more than name-dropping.

Duvall in particular uses his few minutes to indicate where this cycle of misfortune began - and how Karl's options became so tragically limited so long ago.