Grace Quigley's Cheekbones

"People don't make any sense."-- Dennis Quaid, mise en scene with emotionally disheartened second wife.

Steve Kloves creates a few mystifying scenes in Flesh and Bone, a last decade vehicle that, off the top of my head, has a reminiscent affinity to Arthur Miller's ruthlessness in The Misfits. The boy with the scalp contusion who opens the film is complaisant, and it is possibly arguable he did not have to be so pliant before Caan sucks the air out of the void with grim annihilation. Caan's later admission, that he forgot about the screaming baby, in order to sustain the plot, veers close to being a mere device, and when we then see the adult Quaid as a relatively decent cow poke with a quixotic vending trade, there is little to avail oneself as to why the boy stayed decent under the influence of a malicious sociopathy. And then, towards the movie climax, we have Meg Ryan and the symbolism of wading through the grass with Gywneth Paltrow. Say what?

Yet the narrative resonates, much as does the menace in Caan's eyes, the superstar Sony Corleone of my childhood. Some younger viewers may not realize The Godfather trilogy was like a modern American Wagner in the 1970's. I was convinced, thoroughly, after seeing the saga, that my father knew real Don Angelo Bruno and was a capotone, and if he knew I was making this admission public, he would disown me, though he's disowned me countless of times.

Quaid appeals. Generic all American, John Wayne with a more meritocratic range, teaching us about how to shoulder horrific burdens of any consequence. He does shoulder it within an American frontier that still seems barren, vast, free, turning ape men into methodical predators willing to cut to the chase. Cope with the cost. No nonsense, thick skulls. This is where The Misfits enters into Kloves design, at least stylistically. Not to put too fine a point on it. Miller was being stark and bleak with his black and white film of damned aspiration and notorious portents. Kloves is stark, but offers the possibility of redemption, but for whom is left ambiguously open. Caan's Sweeney is shunned, feared, manipulative with blame-- and yet is accepted, tolerated as he games basic decency, slowly losing his grip, tended to out of familial duty, and killed with a great deal of courage by a man who would never possibly be able to offer an innocent, but instinctively attuned, survivor anything for the loss of her full potential due to the death of her family. Quaid's Arlis stays sealed in what is an affecting conclusion that hits its mark. Does he deserve being a swindled scapegoat? Could he have done more as a moral, ethical matter? The dog smelled and recognized the child's damnation. Our own manipulation of evolutionary trait functioning as our moral arbiters.