Written and directed by Tim Blake Nelson
Everyone’s a bit more real and everything hits a little harder in a small town. A death, a marriage, the comings and goings, they’re all closer to you because chances are you know those involved. You grew up together, shared the same 15-person class room; they’re so-and-so’s niece or nephew; they’re your ex. Their life becomes your life by extension.
Despite its title, Tim Blake Nelson’s wrenching debut feature Eye of God draws its power from this eye-level intimacy among small town people as two stories, one of lovers and another of a traumatized boy found wandering in the night covered in blood, circle each other until they finally intersect in great tragedy.
Kingfisher is a small town. There’s a hush over it, and people will tell you it’s because people are leaving for opportunities elsewhere now the oil wells are dry. Still here is Ainsley (Martha Plimpton), a young girl waiting for a man to arrive. His name’s Jack (Kevin Anderson) and he’s fresh out of prison on probation with four years left on a sentence he won’t tell Ainsley what is for. They met through a magazine ad, so this first meeting is nervous.
Alongside Ainsley, Jack also found God in jail, and he seems certain of things on some deep level. Before you’ve looked both ways crossing the street, they’re engaged and Jack wants to start a family yesterday.
At some other time and place, 14-year old Tom (Nick Stahl) is picked up by a pair of cops. He’s red with someone else’s blood and struck dumb by what he has seen, making it local sheriff Rogers’ (Hal Holbrook) job to figure out what happened to him.
These two stories run afoul of each other to devastating effect in Nelson’s movie, a beautifully scripted but harrowing story about what hides in our hearts, grounded in the familiar mundane, but driven by a spirituality tormented by the unseen forces that drive us.
It blows the ceiling off the film, opening it up to let it breathe, and suddenly what feels like a rather earthbound affair starts to have wider existential implications. Discussions of God and his line of thinking abound in Nelson’s movie, its own story beginning to resemble a tortured biblical tale with its confounding consequences for those involved. Salt of the earth becomes cosmic dust.
Churches are only spoken of in Eye of God, but the quiet life here in Kingfisher means conversations have the timbre of confessions. They’re whisper-quiet, strangely intimate between those involved, and you need not fear eavesdropping. That’s the nature of a small town, but Nelson uses that fact to grand effect.
You can count the speaking parts of Eye of God on your own ten fingers, and it feels like half the city partakes in this story of existential woe and misfortune. Several of them become involved when they get a fateful phone call in the middle of the night, sleeping next to a loved one in a home we assume to only hold happy memories.
What occurs in Eye of God is a terrible first for all involved, and both Ainsley and Tom are innocents. Their stories in this likewise innocent town tap into that same unsettling power David Lynch will patent in his exploration of America’s white picket fences and the monsters roiling in the soil just out of sight.
Nelson’s look at America is much more direct and unadorned, however, so the savagery that suddenly leaps out at you in Eye of God is all the more disturbing because of it, with its tender moments all the more precious. The end result is a story about a small town tragedy that’s as upsetting as it is moving, cleverly put together, and indicative of Nelson as a profound storyteller with a touch of genius about him.
Mikkel Frederiksen 