Discomfort zone

By Jay A. Fernandez

June 4, 2006 12 AM PT

Special to The Times

GET yourself right with God.

This is the spiritual life raft that floats through the very still, very murky waters of “The King.” Each of the film’s characters -- believers and sinners all -- reaches for it, but even those who grasp its promise of divine grace discover that redemption often entails a devastating bargain.

A collaboration between British documentary director James Marsh (“Troubleman,” “The Burger and the King”) and writer-producer Milo Addica (“Monster’s Ball,” “Birth”), “The King,” which opens in Los Angeles on Friday, is a movie that unfolds with the dread of a looming execution. And some viewers are likely to experience no small discomfort with the brooding drama’s emotional, sexual, spiritual and thematic terrain.

A restless young man named Elvis (Gael Garcia Bernal) exits the Navy and heads to Corpus Christi, Texas, in search of the father he has never met. There he finds David Sandow (William Hurt), a local pastor who turned to God for salvation long ago after recklessly fathering Elvis and abandoning him and his now-deceased mother. Sandow now has a wife, two teenage children and a devoted flock, and after he turns Elvis away, the spurned son slowly, methodically worms his way into the heart of the family while secretly seducing Sandow’s virginal 16-year-old daughter, Malerie (Pell James). Once this clandestine affair comes to the attention of her protective, devout older brother, Paul (Paul Dano), it triggers a grim sequence of events.

“If you set a film in a Christian family and Christian community where there are rules and morals that have to be obeyed and conformed to, and you make that the stuff of people’s nightmares, you make it almost like a moral horror story,” Marsh says.

You also, of course, make it a film destined for fevered debate. The low-budget movie (it was made for just over $2 million with a local Texas crew) is an elliptical grab bag of big ideas and bigger allusions -- Oedipus, the prodigal son, “Hamlet,” Elvis Presley, the Holy Trinity, Cain and Abel -- that has thus far split critics on the story’s thematic pretensions and perceived moral equivocation.

Todd McCarthy at Variety found it “noxious,” “aggravating” and “entirely unpalatable”; the Hollywood Reporter’s Ray Bennett proclaimed it an “accomplished piece of mischief making.”

Surely, any film that delves into religiosity, family values, the aftereffects of a military life, intelligent design, incest, and the nature of suffering and Christian forgiveness is bound to furrow some brows (and given Addica’s penchant for melodramatic provocation, it was meant to). In making Elvis half Mexican and placing the story in a town not far from the border, Marsh even obliquely references America’s inner conflict of the moment -- its ambivalent attitude toward immigrants and assimilation.

“He’s got some pretty jagged observations to make about our life here and things we humans do to each other,” Hurt says of the writer-director.

Stumbling into the zeitgeist

“THE King” is the first fully fictional film that Marsh has directed, and he makes effective use of the “heightened naturalism” that he applied to his documentaries and to “Wisconsin Death Trip,” his fiction-nonfiction hybrid from 1999 that dramatized the real-life violent history of a small town in the 1890s. He recruited Addica because of his admiration for the “Monster’s Ball” script, and the men wrote the “King” screenplay in Texas and New York during the months before and after the attacks on 9/11, when the shifting cultural landscape caught up with their film’s plot and themes.

“At first we were like, ‘How are we going to continue after this major event?’ ” says Addica, who calls the film a “subversive fairy tale.” “And then we said, ‘No, no, no, this is very much about what we’re doing, in an indirect sort of way.’ At that time, things were just starting to change with Darwinism versus creationism, intelligent design. When 9/11 happened it was a wake-up call to America that things were not happy across the globe and that we had to start to do something about it. God and religion have a great deal to do with what happened.”

Marsh, who drew on his own evangelical Christian upbringing in London to color and populate the film’s Bible Belt Texas milieu, says: “Particularly in the last few years you’ve seen a real political empowerment of religious people in this country. In a sense we stumbled into the zeitgeist when we were writing.”

In the course of the film, Elvis perpetrates a series of heinous crimes. In some interpretations of the parable of the prodigal son, the father represents God himself and his capacity for compassion in the face of a repentant sinner. The dilemmas facing Sandow in “The King” become: What if the son’s sins are extreme and extremely personal -- is the pastor’s belief in Christian forgiveness strong enough to overcome such transgressions? And can his own sins ever truly be absolved, even after getting right with God?

“This certainly is a continuing argument against the comfort of the Christian ethos,” Hurt says. “The film is just an amazing collection of terribly difficult questions. It is a majestic tragedy.”

“What [Elvis has] done is pretty out there, but there are figures in the Bible who’ve done equally unspeakable things who come to find God and redemption,” Marsh points out. Christian audiences “get that in a way that some of the more liberal critics may not.”

Just the same, Addica and Marsh are hungry for that debate. But “as a career move, who knows?” Marsh says.

“Making a low-budget independent film that some people are going to really hate may not be such a smart idea.”