E. F. Bloodworth returns to his roots when he is dying. Forty years earlier, he abandoned his wife and three sons and took off to selfishly pursue a singing career which never panned out. Some say he killed a man, and that is the true reason he left. Each of his sons is a mess in his own way. The grandson he never knew has ambitions for a better life to escape the stain of Bloodworth blood. But he is a high school dropout with literary ambitions. How much reality is there in his dreams? Is he just another loser who will never escape? He falls in love with the daughter of a prostitute who, it turns out, is pregnant by another man. Reminds you of the biblical injuntion "the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons even unto the third and fourth generation." That would certainly be celebrated as received truth by one of the sons, a religious fanatic who is bent on punishing his father by hexing him into hell and protecting the barmy mother, who seems to have never stopped loving her wayward husband despite his abandonment; she keeps a framed photo on her wall of him in his locally successful early singing days, days when he may have gotten the idea he had what it took to make it big. Alas, he never made it. The dying man has never had much luck out of life, and his sons are the least of his misfortunes. This is not a movie for those who are impatient for some action. But little gems of scenes are strung together like pearls on a waxed string. E. F.'s scene with a sympathetic landlady of his shabby boardinghouse. The resignation with which he accepts the total lack of familial love as something he deserves. The interest shown him by the grandson, who plays the scratchy non-hit he recorded for his girlfriend. The sympathy the old man feels for that grandson's interest in a trashy young woman. The genuine pathology of two of the sons -- Brady the fanatic and Boyd (father of the sole granddhild), the murderous stalker of the wife who left him and her lover -- and the surprisingly supportive acceptance by son Warren, bar owner, womanizer, sharp dresser,and prodigal son, who after identifying himself to a father who doesn't recognize him, and reminding the father of a never-realized promise to take him fishing, produces two fishing rods to remedy that. Some of the dream sequences are hard to follow, and the ending has a curiously unfinished air, yet it's as ragged as real life. Real life, much as we might like it, is never tied up in a bow. The acting is superb. Kristofferson has never been better -- sometimes laconic and even warm, but with flashes of the kind of edginess and self-interest which suggests that this old man might have been a darker personality and a dangerous handful in his younger days. As the grandson, Reece, reads to a college class in creative writing a fictionalized account of his grandfather's life (in the closing sequence when he has married Raven and taken on as a son the boy who is not his-- a hopeful and optimistic finish) "the old man did not come home to make peace with his family; the old man came home to make peace with himself." Frances Conroy is surprisingly good as the defeated and worn wife who holds E. F.'s secrets. Val Kilmer is superb as the closest thing to a good son that E. F. had, and probably the most closely reflects the old man. Dwight Yoakam is truly scary, and Hilary Duff is luminous. If you consider "relationship" films as boring as picking lint from your navel, look elsewhere. This one is a long, slow trip into the darkest corners of the human heart and back out again.
Review of Bloodworth
