Flesh & Bone

Steve Klove’s Lost Masterpiece

From The Blood Poets: A Cinema of Savagery, 1958-99

So what is freedom? You’re bound by physical laws, bound by your body, bound by your mind. . . . In any case, there’s not one meaning to life. There should be as many meanings as there are individuals—you assign meaning to life. If you don’t assign it it, then clearly it has none whatsoever.

—Paul Bowles, Conversations

Steve Kloves’ Flesh and Bone (1993) is a rare bird indeed, a movie with unassuming depths. A beautiful film, moving and eerie and almost mysterious in its effects, it has a grace and poetry all its own. And it went almost entirely unnoticed by the movie-going public. (Today it is perhaps best known, if known at all, as one of Gwyneth Paltrow’s earliest featured roles.) It’s easy to see why it disappeared without a trace: it’s an incredibly subtle film by any standards, and compared to your average ’90s fare, it barely “exists” at all. It’s like a phantom, a hazy dream. Watching it is like passing through a roadside town, catching a glimpse of a diner and a bar, and imagining the lives of ordinary folk (never so ordinary as we think); then scratching the surface of their routines, and revealing the turmoil beneath. Flesh and Bone is a real road movie, maybe the best of them all, because it creates a perfect sense of people moving, forever moving, but never actually getting anywhere. The characters in the movie are like fish in a barrel, like flies in a sun-drenched room; their movement is central to who they are as people, and also to the meaning and the structure of the film, which is about rootlessness: a lack of having any place to go. All the characters in Flesh and Bone are restless; they are searching for something without knowing, or especially caring, what. They are simply moving because they cannot bear to remain still; like blood in the veins, perhaps.

The story entails the quest of one man to free himself from his past. In an extremely slow, almost silent opening (we are so used to movies “coming on” to us in the first five minutes that it takes a real effort to pay attention here), we see a young boy and an older man, his father, raiding a farmhouse and—the boy a not-quite passive witness—slaughtering everyone there save for a screaming baby in its crib. It’s a simple robbery, apparently, and Kloves doesn’t play up the horrific aspect—this is not In Cold Blood we are seeing. The scene is rather unnervingly gentle, in fact—we never see the murders but only hear the shots—and its function (as we shall see) is to establish the guilt that will haunt and oppress the boy, Arlis, as he grows to be a man, and also to show us the terrible, crippling hold which his father has over him from the start. Arlis is played by Dennis Quaid, and his father by James Caan. This is the male half of the curious quartet of lost souls which the movie gives us. The female half is played by Gwyneth Paltrow, as Ginnie, and Meg Ryan (in probably her best role to date), as Kay; the former being a wandering petty thief who (we later discover) has hooked up with Arlis’s father, the latter a spunky but listless cheerleader whom Arlis meets emerging from a wedding cake (to the strains of “Bad to the Bone”). He carries her back to his home after she falls down drunk, the moment after emerging from the cake. They strike up a curious, yearning relationship: Arlis is so constricted, so sensitized by his inner torments, that he can barely stand to be touched; Kay in her own way is disassociated from human contact too, and reaches out to him as passionately as she dares, in fear of scaring him away. As the film unfolds, and the paths and destinies of the two couples gradually begin to overlap, the film starts to cut remarkably close to the bone. Kloves works very slowly, very gently, towards his meanings, which are so personal, so intimate, that they defy any categorization, amounting to no more nor less than the mysteries of human nature, the magic of our foibles. Every one of the characters seems to awaken, disturb, or accentuate something in every other; they are like different facets of a single dilemma, groping blindly through the darkness of their private despair, unaware of what they are feeling, unable to communicate it, or to acknowledge their mutual, unelected affinities. Kloves gives us a quartet of blind people fumbling around the elephant of their collective soul, never grasping the magnitude, or the mystery, of their predicament. And he works all this in at such an intuitive, hidden level that when he throws us the film’s major twist—that Kay was the crying baby in the crib, it was her family that he helped slaughter—the improbability of the “coincidence” hardly registers; it seems natural, right. It is a device, but not a generic one; it’s rather a mythical or poetic device, for it serves not only to cement the uneasy, unspoken intimacy (of guilt and longing) between Arlis and Kay, but also to finally bring the two men, the two generations, head to head at last. Only so can Arlis finally assume responsibility for himself, and turn away from the death-like spell of his past, and so move on, into an uncertain but living future.

The director, Steve Kloves (probably the most neglected movie genius in recent memory, his debut film being the equally remarkable The Fabulous Baker Boys), has hatched the film out of his own head, yet it has a strong novelistic feel to it, and one might easily assume it to come from a literary source. Kloves may be a natural-born writer; his worlds have depth, because his creations live. They are flesh and blood characters that breathe, and are way beyond the functionary figures we are accustomed to finding in movies. What he does here (and in Baker Boys) is more or less unique in American cinema; Flesh and Bone is an American movie that is actually about something, making it doubly ironic—or maybe even typical—that no one went to see it. Kloves has come up with a story that is dramatic without being remotely contrived; it has all the basic elements of melodrama, but it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before. What’s especially impressive is the way he makes the implausibility of the events actually work for the story, not against it, creating less of an ordinary tale and more of a mythical journey. His film is a pure character piece; the characters are everything here and the story, such as it is, arises wholly out of them. At the same time, the characters are defined by their story; we get to know them little by little—how they are and why they are that way—as the story progresses. (This is with the exception of Ginnie, who remains mysterious, ethereal, to the end.)

At an “academic” level, in terms of the rules and the function of melodrama, Flesh and Bone is an outstanding, almost flawless, example of the art of scriptwriting. Because of this total centrality of the characters (and because of their realness), the plot seems to progress or grow as if organically, and never once seems forced or facile. Although the odds of these people linking up like this are a million to one, our awareness of that doesn’t lessen the film’s impact, but rather intensifies it, by giving it an almost magical flavor. Flesh and Blood is about lost souls, and as such—without getting fanciful—it’s about the nature or dilemma of being human, of being morally at sea, undefined, adrift, with nothing to moor us except what other people think of us. And then of course, our family ties. It might even be said that this film is about the “burden of blood,” the sins of the father, the curse of yesterday.

Gwyneth Paltrow plays (to perfection) the only real “free spirit” in the movie, and her Ginnie is completely empty, almost a ghost; she seems to be chained to her petty thief’s existence and drifts from one scam to the next, literally without a care in the world. She cares for nobody and nothing, least of all for herself. Arlis, on the other hand, is all too real, “a creature of habit,” in his own words, shackled to his routine, as the only thing that keeps him secure, that keeps his anguish and guilt at bay. Quaid—freed from his perpetual shit-eating grin—impeccably portrays a disturbed individual without ever overstating it; using no obvious ticks he gives us a powerful sense of the tension at the heart of the character. He is actually well-matched by Ginnie, hence his fascination with her. They are like two ghosts, only of totally different kinds. The two women are also drawn together by mysterious, unconscious factors, a sense of affinity that they cannot quite admit to. The men have something to finish, to bring to an end, to resolve; the women seem to be seeking in each other what they haven’t got themselves. Kay wants independence, the courage to drift, to be free of other people’s thoughts. Ginnie, on the other hand, needs stability, “solidity,” the capacity to commit, to “land”: to exist in the world with other people. There seems no chance she’ll ever make it, however, and—with the possible, partial exception of Arlis—all the characters remain lost at the end. Despite everything they have been through the film leaves one with the sense that they are essentially unchanged: that Arlis will be just as hung up as ever, maybe more so, Ginnie will carry on drifting from man to man and scam to scam, and Kay will probably find another man in “the men’s club” to possess her and oppress her with his thoughts. The curse of “humanness”—of habit—seems too powerful for us to ever hope to overcome it. But if that’s the film’s message (or one of them), Kloves keeps it beautifully understated to the very end, and never allows the film to slip into melodrama, not even when the gun comes out and the blood starts to flow.

When the son slays his father, in order to save a woman he maybe loves, he says simply: “Sweet dreams.” He is putting the past to rest. It’s a beautiful killing line, and with it Quaid expresses all the love and anguish that the moment demands. The look on Caan’s face as he falls is likewise so perfect that it seems to encapsulate the whole movie: it contains all the suffering, the anger and futility—all the savagery and longing and loneliness and despair—of wandering ghosts in a world too real to bear. The look reveals a mixture of pride and sorrow, of relief and horror, that his own blood has turned against him. This is pure mythic stuff—the son who must slay his father to become a man—and it is perfectly conceived, because the way the drama is drawn the son has to destroy the father, in order to be free of his tyrannical influence. He has to make a conscious choice at last, between his love, represented by the girl, and his fear, embodied in the old man. The fact that he does make the right choice, in full consciousness, suggests that—of all the characters in this somber and hazy poem of blood—he alone might just come out ahead. But he pays a heavy price: in order to embrace the future, it is sometimes necessary to murder the past.

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