Cole has more than a little in common with The Last Picture Show's innocent Sonny Crawford, but Cruz's Alejandra, despite her protective father and aunt, is no small-town girl. After the actress's barely sentient turn in Captain Corelli, this comes as something of a relief. Cruz has hardly more to do in terms of lines, but in the few moments allowed, she lets us know that Alejandra's freshness is skin-deep.In a lovely exchange, Cole, having seen Alejandra rub her nose, asks anxiously, "Do I have something in my nose?", to which she replies, with a gulping laugh, "No, I have something in my nose!". Elsewhere, the camera nuzzles so close to her jawline that we can see filaments of facial hair. Thornton's movie flirts with magic-realism (men sing and dance before Cole's eyes), but in relation to its female star, it's unexpectedly down to earth.There's no question, though, that the real pleasure of the film is Lucas Black's Blevins, the young 'un on the fancy horse who sets everyone's plans so horribly awry. Black, the truculent little centre of TV's American Gothic, not to mention Sling Blade itself, has lost his puffball curves in the years since.
Paradoxically, this just makes his character's bursts of softness all the more affecting. His Blevins is not quite the neurotic poet of the novel that great speech about how lightning is at war with the Blevins family gets mangled by the actor's impatient mouth but the boy's still gorgeously weird. Crouched in his knickers after a night of lashing rain, his sunny stoicism says it all.The more you know about this Blevins, the less you understand. His tadpole limbs dwarfed by his big hat (Thornton keeps cranking the camera angles to make it look even bigger), he's a creature continually morphing between frightened boy and cunning old man. There's something of the sprite about him, too (he has that knack of squeezing silence into a landscape). When he says his stepfather used to beat him, you may or may not believe him.
Ditto when, telling Cole and Rawlins how he become involved in a shoot-out, he claims he fired at a Mexican policeman in self-defence. What a relief: he's an unknown quantity.The death knell of this sprawlingly ambitious film can be heard when Thornton tries to fix Blevins literally with a freeze-frame. As he is dragged off, by the police, for the aforementioned crimes, the boy's scrawny face stops, ?a Jean-Pierre L?d's in Les Quatre Cents Coups. It was the absence of expression in the face of Truffaut's delinquent that was so moving. Thornton, by contrast, just wants to give us time to soak up Blevins' fear.
