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| Red White, & Blue |
Noah Taylor, of the
Tomb Raider movies with Angelina Jolie,
gets a real chance to carry a film, particularly in the harrowing closing forty
minutes of
Red White & Blue as an Army interrogator harboring a dark side.
His Nate in this film isn’t above stabbing and horrifying the wife and daughter
of a member of a garage band (The Exits) that jams together in order to secure
the entire body of his wife, Erica (Amanda Miller, in a brave, emotionally raw
performance). Erica, the recipient of molestation at the young age of four, is
a man-hating nymphomaniac, spreading the HIV virus to as many men as possible
who are willing to fuck her. It seems she purposely attends bars and clubs with
the sole desire to pick up men and infect them! Her inner pain runs deep and inflicting
her disease on men, all sexually interested in her and seemingly an example of
the mother’s boyfriend responsible for screwing up her psyche (a corrupting
influence that ruined her sense of morality and normality), is almost like a
therapeutic revenge. When she meets Nate, however, he awakens something that
seems practically borderline affection. He doesn’t threaten to pollute her in
the same fashion as the many men (140 is a number she thinks is close to how
many have had sex with her!) before him, so Erica agrees to marry him. When a
barely-held-together guitarist with a Cancer-stricken mother (he holds dear to
his heart), named Franki (Mark Senter; he was the crazy Ray Pye in the
notorious Jack Ketcham flick,
The Lost), learns of his infection thanks to her,
he sets in motion a series of events that will encourage Nate to commit some
serious retribution, leaving behind quite a nightmarish trail of bodies in his
wake. Disturbing, unsettling developments thanks in part to Franki’s rage, and
his reluctant, mortified bandmates that become unwitting participants in the
cover-up of Erica’s death,
Red White & Blue doesn’t necessarily take a dark
turn (the film is wholly dark, to be honest), as much as, bring together two
parties (Nate and The Exits) resulting from Franki’s inability to control the
malevolence building inside him due to his infecting his mother with HIV not
long after she had went into Remission. Using HIV as a weapon, Erica not only
afflicts the men that have sexual contact with her, but other innocents are
polluted as well. There’s tragedy all over this film. The Exits aren’t
necessarily excused from punishment because they were willing to help dispose
of Erica (who was cut into pieces, placed in bags and wrapped in duct tape) for
their pal Franki (and they knew he was “taking care of Erica”, trapping her in
his home), but seeing Nate execute his plans for each of them was more than a
bit unnerving. Not putting aside loyalty for Franki, doing the right thing by
reporting his use of a knife after his mother died, the Exits placed themselves
in the crosshairs…not collateral damage, per se, but close. I think the power
of the film is in how Nate conducts his strategic hunt for “all of Erica”,
searching for each member of the Exits, learning of where her pieces were
before enacting his final adieu to her memory through violence. Scenes include
seeing a terrified girl told by Nate to choose to die with her family or live
by herself without them, attempts at decapitating a live victim as he screams,
and a face wrapped in duct tape while the victim loses oxygen. Erica’s fate is
certainly unfortunate as is Franki’s mom. Senter does multi-faceted psychopathy
well, conveying a person who is both tenderhearted (more or less for his mom
and girlfriend) and unhinged, while Noah totally escapes into the role of a societal
reject, with roughly hewn beard and hair, a jean jacket (absent sleeves) with
an American flag on the back, and gruff looks. Noah, though, has a character
that isn’t so easily defined…besides what you see, he appears fiercely loyal to
Erica, and his love for her I think can’t be questioned. I think the film
enters a point in Nate’s life when love was exactly what he needed; Erica, a
different sexual partner every night, with a dysfunction that torments her, is
the same way. I think the violence at the end against the Exits was in its own
way an extension of that lost love that Nate was exacting on them for taking it
away.
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