CREEP IN THE HEART OF TEXAS
Texas Killing Fields
Review by M.V. Moorhead/Less Hat, Moorhead
In the middle of Texas Killing Fields, two detectives are examining the body of a murdered young woman, lying half-submerged in the water of the title marshland. Detective Heigh (Jeffery Dean Morgan) observes a fingerprint on her neck, and at the same moment it starts to rain. In a panic, he and his friend Detective Stall (Jessica Chastain) struggle to preserve this crucial clue while pulling the wet, unwieldy corpse onto the bank.
It’s a harrowing, heartbreaking scene, maybe the best in this grim and atmospheric police drama, loosely based on true events and directed by Ami Canaan Mann. It reflects the overall experience of Texas Killing Fields: You get a glimpse of the forces behind the horror, and then the hostile, unpredictable environment shifts, and you’re lost again.
It’s rare for an American crime movie to treat a dead body as something other than a prop, a font of exposition, but the bodies of young women that keep turning up in this small, grungy Gulf Coast Texas city, or dumped in the marshlands adjacent, have a physicality, a wretched weight. The investigators aren’t depicted, in the manner of so many movies of this sort, as casual and business-as-usual around the victims; they’re anxious and, though they speak softly, palpably angry.
The angriest is Detective Souder (Sam Worthington), Heigh’s partner and Stall’s ex-husband. His anger leads him to stupid, counterproductive outbursts of violence, but it also paralyzes him. Heigh wants to explore the link between their victim and a string of others that have been found in the “Killing Fields” nearby, while Souder wants nothing to do with cases outside his jurisdiction, especially on his ex-wife’s turf.
He’s pretty sure that his and Heigh’s case is linked to a sordid prostitution ring in town anyway. Heigh, a haunted ex-NYC cop and a devout Catholic—he murmurs the Hail Mary over a victim—suspects that there’s a bigger picture. Both of them are terrified for Little Anne (Chloe Moretz), daughter of a miserable local hooker (a shockingly haggard-looking Sheryl Lee, of Twin Peaks). Poor Anne seems appallingly tailor-made to join the gallery of victims.
Director Mann (the daughter, as she is probably weary of reviewers noting, of Michael Mann) nails the settings—the town is a muggy, dirty shithole that’s no place to live, let alone die, while the marsh, with its twisted, leafless trees, would have an unearthly beauty if it weren’t so charged with threat. She shows a strong touch with the actors here, too. Worthington, Chastain and especially Morgan are so low-key that it’s almost disorienting at first; they aren’t working from the standard cop-show-acting playbook, even when Donald F. Ferrarone’s dialogue seems to call for it. But their controlled intensity accumulates force.
Mann and Ferrarone are less successful with the police-procedural side of the material; at times I found myself confused, and not in the good way. But there’s an emotional maturity to Mann’s work here which even some of her father’s films can’t claim—an awareness of the reality of human suffering that can without too much pushing be called authentically tragic.
It comes out, especially, in her handling of Moretz, as Little Anne. She strikes me as one of the least smarmily sexualized adolescent girls I can think of in many a movie. Through the other characters, and through her alert, sympathetic, unleering camera, Mann treats Little Anne not as a white trash Lolita but as an imperiled and precious child.
M.V. Moorhead is a frequent Jabcat On Movies contributor whose work has also appeared in publications ranging from the New Times weeklies to USA Today to Weird Tales. His e-novel, “Super Eight Days” (no relation to the film “Super 8″) is available from Amazon Kindle.
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