Arkansas

Arkansas

The rural neo-noir “Arkansas” is a sort of eulogy to a myth: the Real America, that vast, oft-mythologized sub-continent populated by soulful, wisecracking rednecks whose relations with women, drugs and people of color are more complicated than you’d think. To enjoy “Arkansas,” an adaptation of John Brandon’s novel by Clark Duke (who also directed) and Andrew Boonkrong, you have to want or at least not be violently allergic to watching good ol’ boys feeling sorry for themselves while simultaneously making themselves look smarter and nobler than the rest of the hoi polloi.

If you can either overlook or embrace that species of self-pitying/valorizing worldview, you might groove on the narrative convolution and hardboiled dialogue in “Arkansas,” which follows two small-time drug dealers (played by Duke and Liam Hemsworth) who get caught up in a sprawling criminal conspiracy.

Most of the time it doesn’t look like much (a lot of music-video lighting), and often it’s over edited so it feels like a season’s worth of Prestige TV crammed into one two-hour film. But there are incidental pleasures along Brandon’s back road to nowhere trip, which ends on a downer that can be seen from many miles away even if you haven’t read his book.

The story line here is intricate but not really complicated: stoic drug dealer Kyle (Hemsworth) and his flip business partner Swin (Duke) stumble into bad after routine goes bad during routine drug run; they wind up working for Bright (John Malkovich), a sadistically malevolent drug kingpin/full time park ranger who effortlessly exploits them because he’s slightly higher-ranking than they are in the local gangster food chain overseen by the mysterious crime boss Frog (Vince Vaughn) and Frog’s equally mysterious drug supplier “Her” (Vivica A. Fox).

They don’t mind being exploited for a while, Kyle and Swin until Swin starts dating Johanna (Eden Brolin), a local girl who is an earnest Christian (i.e., she prays) but is also predictably smarter than her association with Swin might suggest.

After that point, “Arkansas” is made only ostensibly complicated by the fact that we’re shown a series of flashbacks and tangential sub-plots about Frog and his business associates that provide more background information than you need to know about people who hustle or are hustled by other drug dealers. Most of Brandon, Boonkrong and Duke’s characters telegraph their problems by shrugging them off with clipped and sometimes dryly comic dialogue; at one point Ranger Bright gets tortured with a clothes hangar and growls, “I’ve never been tortured before.”

That brand of gallows humor describes the surface tone of “Arkansas,” which often feels like a less inspired riff on “Breaking Bad,” only now it’s more about how sad it is to be poor white trash. There’s also a smirking, often overweening quality to Boonkrong and Duke’s dialogue, probably because it seems like they reverently lifted whole chunks of it from Brandon’s book. Which is frustrating only because there often seems to be more to these people than a few good one-liners and a lot of bad luck.

Therefore, it is not surprising that some of the best and the worst parts of “Arkansas” are when Frog learns to hustle or be hustled. They both look sad and cool at the same time which is why Vaughn and his co-star Michael K. Williams, playing a characteristically seedy but charming character named “Almond,” sell their scenes so well.

But there’s a smarminess to this section of the film because Frog and Almond are as interesting as their monotonous screw or screw be screwed behavior. There’s also a lot of willful unexamined prejudices sitting on the movie’s placid surface, like when Frog gets jumped by a group of tough customers outside of a bar with a Confederate flag pinned to its side.

It’s often hard to know why we’re supposed to like Frog, or at least find him charming in his scumbaggery. He keeps a revolver in his desk drawer next to two gold-foil condoms. He visits a prostitute at a motel beside an obviously foregrounded Waffle House. And when she tells him “[I] love you, baby,” he quietly sneers back “Sure ya do,” a line that is unsurprisingly echoed later on by another character in somewhat ironic new context.

‘Arkansas’ is just that kind of movie, because its creators seem to be just as infatuated with their sad sack outlaw rebels as they are with their self-pitying fatalism. In the press notes for the film Duke says that “this is (my personal version of) the real South,” which he says is “heartbreaking and hilarious, poetic without being sentimental, mannered but brutally honest.” I wish I’d seen that movie, and hope Duke gets to make it one day soon.”

Watch Arkansas For Free On Gomovies.