'Arkansas' is (sigh of relief) kinda good

You probably want Arkansas to be good.

I know I did.

It's the passion project/directorial debut of Clark Duke, born in Hot Springs and raised in Glenwood. In the early '90s, he was a child actor on Linda Bloodworth-Thomason's Hearts Afire, and he has worked fairly steadily as an actor since conspiring with his friend Michael Cera on the adorably awkward improvised CBS web series Clark and Michael back in 2007. He was on the American version of The Office and popped up in films like Sex Drive (2008), Kick-Ass (2010) and Hot Tub Time Machine (2010). Now he's 34, and you get the feeling he might want to take on something a little more grown-up.

He's apparently got good taste. The source material for this film is John Brandon's 2009 novel of the same name, a taut and funny crime novel that felt a little like Carl Hiaasen and a little like Jim Thompson. With its off-handedness about cruel and violent things, it is probably as influenced by the cinema of Joel and Ethan Coen as it is by any hard-boiled novelist.

I went into Arkansas hoping it would work. I want every movie to work. That's what movie-watchers do. We want to be able to relax into the vibe and follow the story and be genuinely surprised by characters we come to have feelings for and about.

But I was worried for the first 15 minutes or so. Not because those 15 minutes were bad, they just seemed a little awkward, with Liam Hemsworth (the youngest of the 74 Hemsworth brothers working in Hollywood, and not the one who plays Thor but the one who was in The Hunger Games) explaining to us in voice-over how he's Kyle, a low-level drug dealer working for the Dixie Mafia which isn't all that organized. He's never met his boss, a guy called Frog, but now he's being promoted to run some wholesale shipments in a truck with a new partner, a motormouth named Swin (Duke) who favors Hawaiian shirts, track pants, weak mustaches and ties his hair up in a topknot, which Swin probably knows is called a "chonmage" because he seems like the sort who would know all about samurai culture, and if he didn't would make something up.

Meanwhile, Kyle is the laconic type, as unassuming and low-key as anyone who looks like Brad Pitt's hotter younger brother can possibly be. It's an uneasy partnership, but we understand that these two will become friends because that's how things go in these stories. And because Swin tells us as much.

Anyway, neither of our guys is too good at drug hauling, and they've stopped to re-mediate some mistakes with duct tape when they're approached by John Malkovich in a uniform asking them questions about their suspicious load. I thought at first Malkovich was a state trooper, but it turns out he's a park ranger whose name is Bright. He also works for Frog, and -- change of plans -- the boys are going to be working for him, ostensibly as "junior rangers" but actually as drug traffickers. He puts them up in identical trailers on his park. They are not to mess with the locals, a rule Swin immediately violates by taking up with Johnna (Eden Brolin, daughter of Josh, granddaughter of James, a face so fresh she doesn't even have her own Wikipedia page yet).

Now, this is an odd part of the movie. I'm guessing Bright was following them all along and that he was either pretty sure that Kyle, who pulls a gun on him, wasn't going to shoot, or he's just one of those fatalistic types who doesn't fear being parking-lot gut-shot by a scared and none-too-bright drug runner. You could make the case because Bright is an odd duck, or as a friend of mine is given to saying a "strange ranger" (sorry), and he lives like a soft boy mahatma in a curiously large and posh cabin, which has an oversized garage to hold his prized late-model Corvette. Take Malkovich's character from The New Pope, strip off the eyeliner and swap out the fey British accent for a fey Southern one, and you've got Ranger Bright -- the sort of character who can make you tired.

Fortunately, Bright doesn't hang around too long, and when Vince Vaughn -- as Frog -- appears, the movie shifts into a kickier and zestier gear. Now, it's the '80s, and we see how Frog got his start and how he learned his trade from the wonderful Michael Kenneth Williams (The Wire's Omar) and eventually deposed his mentor. The memory of his own rise informs the way he runs his operation, and unlike the management gurus advise, he tends not to hire employees smarter than himself.

Though there is an intricate plot weaving through Arkansas -- which, with the exception of some unmistakable Hot Springs footage, was not shot here but in anonymous piney woods tax-incentive-providing Alabama -- you can probably enjoy the film if you lose the thread. There's a lot to look at and ponder and wonder about -- why do they call the place where the character Her (Vivica A. Fox) lives a houseboat when it's obviously a house on a pier? -- and all the performances, with the possible exception of Malkovich's, are pretty well-calibrated. There are some droll lines and the violence is sudden and ugly and seems appropriate to the sort of lesson delivered. If, as Ranger Bright tells us, the bored criminal is a good criminal, then we should mark how interesting the lives of Kyle and Swin get.

Early hiccups aside, Duke does a good job managing this film -- it's divided into five chapters, which helps with the chronology -- and he either works well with actors or has good instincts in hiring them. (Duke employs his younger brother Chandler in a small but crucial role. And Chandler Duke is fine in the part except for one thing. He looks so much like Clark that I immediately wondered, "Is that guy Clark Duke's brother?") And his Swin grows on you, eventually capturing your empathy, just as he predicted.

Hemsworth may have the more difficult role here; he never convinces us Kyle is as dumb as he says he is, though that's probably because Kyle isn't dumb at all. Like most Aussie actors, he seems to have no problem with a Southern accent, and if he were a few thousand degrees less pretty, he might pass for the sort of nondescript lowlife he's playing. But he can't help how he looks.

Local folks are likely to feel a little dislocated by the sight of Arkansas place names being applied to places that are no such thing, but that likely won't bother the rest of the country. At least Bathhouse Row gets its close-up.

And Duke has made a movie he can be proud of, an enjoyable dark comedy that, like Kyle, is maybe a little too smart for its own good.

MovieStyle on 05/01/2020