Life-taker: 'The Quarry' ruminates on morality as a murderer assumes life of a preacher

Rev. David Martín (Bruno Bichir) is a Good Samaritan.

He sees the man (Shea Whigham) face down in the dirt by the side of the road, he stops. Maybe he sees something of himself in this obviously distressed man, who has been walking for days, away from some inexorable crime. For the reverend has not always been a reverend and like all men he has secrets and weaknesses.

"God is funny to bring you to me," Rev. Martín tells him. He helps the man, he feeds him. He goes too far.

The man bristles, then snaps and bashes Martín's head in with a wine bottle. He disposes of the body quickly, almost casually, in a nearby quarry. And the man takes the Good Samaritan's van and effects and drives to the Texas border town where the Good Samaritan has a new job waiting, as the pastor of the town's only church. He takes the Good Samaritan's life, he calls himself David Martin.

Scott Teems' The Quarry feels like a parable. The main characters barely have names -- we don't know the fake David Martín's real name; the lawman who becomes suspicious of him (Michael Shannon) is known as Chief Moore. The one-church town is called Bevel, which is what you call a sloping edge, a slant but was more likely chosen by Teems and his co-writer Andrew Brotzman because it sounds like it could be the name of some dusty generic Texas village. The lack of specificity feels like a choice when you consider that the source novel by Damon Galgut is set in the author's native South Africa.

The novel has an interesting history. The original version, which was only published in South Africa, was turned into a film in 1998 that was well-received by the few who managed to see it. I've no way of telling how much or little the original book varies from the revised version, but all iterations have the same title and tell basically the same story, with presumably the same chords of guilt, forgiveness and racial tension underpinning the action. Galgut is a spare writer; he maintains emotional distance from his characters, who are sketched with a few taut lines. His chapters are sometimes barely a page long.

Teems, who directed the excellent That Evening Sun in 2009, and has since worked steadily as a writer and producer on shows like Rectify and Narcos: Mexico, has made a slow-burning movie that's faithful to the spirit of Galgut's prose. The new David moves into the boarding house that has traditionally housed the preachers that come and go in Bevel. The landlord Celia (Catalina Sandino Moreno) says more than once that he's not like the others she's known -- it's not immediately clear what she means by that, but maybe she means it as a compliment.

Chief Moore becomes suspicious of David; all the other preachers who've been hired by the church have been of Mexican descent, but he's a white man. Still, the congregants love his sermons, which speak of sin and forgiveness, even if most of them are recent immigrants who don't follow his English all that well. He comforts the dying, he does good work. (In some ways, The Quarry reminds me of Corpus Christi, the 2019 Polish drama about a criminal who pretends to be and sort of becomes a priest.)

If only David had done a better job of hiding the body, everyone might have been happy with him taking over the church. A couple of brothers -- drug dealer Valentin (Bobby Soto) and Poco (Alvaro Martinez) -- break into David's van. Moore marks them as the usual suspects, and is alarmed when bloody clothes are found in Valentin's trailer.

"I think somebody stepped to you when you were robbing that van," he says. "And [things] got out of hand.That tells me we've got a victim somewhere, either dead or extremely ... injured."

But Valentin has a theory of his own. And as much as Moore would like to ignore it, he might not be able to.

The Quarry gives Whigham and Shannon -- two powerhouse actors who've worked together before in HBO's Boardwalk Empire and Jeff Nichols' Take Shelter -- an opportunity to do some fine and sometimes ferocious work. But the script might be too freighted with symbolism, it relies too much on coincidences. It's a bit like the early Elton John album Tumbleweed Connection, too vague at times, hinting at a profundity that the script doesn't support.

The church isn't an identifiable denomination, though it certainly is not Catholic, which is what you might expect. The man who becomes David comes from nowhere, we have no entry into his psychology. Moore does have little bit of conflict in his character, in a way he's sleeping with the enemy. He's aware of his own hypocrisies.

Still, this drama will hit a sweet spot for some, It's a deliberate and human-scaled affair, the sort of movie that probably would have gotten lost in the normal course of things, if the studios hadn't pulled back all their big-budget releases until the covid-19 business blows over. Like almost every movie ever made, The Quarry is more a work of craft than art, but it is satisfying in the way well-made, modest things can be. It's worth your attention.

MovieStyle on 04/17/2020