Movie Loner

Writer/Director Steve Kloves is responsible for one of my all-time favorite films. I’m not going to tell you what it is because I’ll review it here in the future. I’m such a tease. Kloves knows his craft because Flesh and Bone is pretty damn good. It’s another film that was inexplicably overlooked by audiences. Here’s my attempt at redemption.

Dennis Quaid stars as Arlis Sweeney, a Texas vending machine stocker with a permanent scowl etched across his weathered face. He lives a mundane existence preferring as little human contact as possible. Arlis has been carrying around a haunting memory for almost thirty years. He watched his burglar father (James Caan) murder a family, leaving a crying baby as sole survivor.

Arlis’s quiet life is disrupted by Kay (Meg Ryan), a wayward young woman who joins him on the road after splitting with her freeloading husband. Kay provides a much needed bolt of energy to Arlis’s dull life. Two lonely souls, they soon become involved. Their brief happiness is compromised by a knock on the hotel door in the middle of the night. Arlis’s estranged father, Roy, returns with nothing but trouble. A stunning revelation brings Arlis and Roy to an abandoned farmhouse. The same farmhouse where thirty years before a family was murdered.

Flesh and Bone is just a great story. Kloves wrote a strong set of characters. Quaid gives one of his better performances, and Caan steals the movie as the cold-blooded Roy. Gwyenth Paltrow, in an early film role, also stands out playing a snake-eyed grifter who likes to steal from the dead. This is a movie that stayed with me for couple days after seeing it. I have no idea why it slipped through the cracks, but it shouldn’t have.