The soulless, brainless serial-killer comedy Clay Pigeons isn’t the sort of movie that should be dismissed lightly; it should be dismissed forcefully and from a great height, preferably in the direction of the nearest dumpster. Directed by David Dobkin, a former (and future) maker of music videos, Clay Pigeons takes place in one of those generic Western locales—here labeled “Mercer, Montana”—that lazy coastal filmmakers can’t be bothered to detail or populate. It has the same backdrops that turn up in every indie film set outside Manhattan: greasy spoon, hoosegow, honky-tonk, gas station.
The backwoods location is important to the makers of these classist indie smirkfests—the setting explains automatically why the entire town is made up of sluts, slashers, and slack-jawed yokels. Here, Joaquin Phoenix plays a pump jockey who learns, in the very first scene and in the very worst way, that his best friend Earl knows about those on-the-sly lube jobs with Earl’s wife. Sorry to spoil the surprise, but Earl suddenly kills himself, though not before somehow convincing Phoenix that he’ll be blamed for the death. Phoenix is dumb enough to take the bait—there’d be no movie if he weren’t—and soon Earl’s nympho wife (Georgina Cates, strenuously overacting) is demonstrating a murderous streak of her own.
Thanks to screenwriter Matt Healy, whose script is emptier than the men’s room outside One True Thing, there are two extraneous killings in the movie before the serial killer even shows up. Nevertheless, his arrival transforms a merely obnoxious movie into a noxious one. Lester, played by Vince Vaughn, is a drifting cowboy charmer who looks like a Junior Brown action figure; soon he’s befriended Phoenix and moved in on Earl’s wife. Unbeknownst to the townspeople, though, likable Lester is actually a sex criminal with a trail of mutilated victims. Within no time, Phoenix is the target of an FBI investigation, and Lester is zeroing in on the lead agent (Janeane Garofalo).
Part of the body of serial-killer lore is that multiple murderers dehumanize their prey in order to kill with a clear conscience. That’s not markedly different from the filmmakers’ method here. While Vaughn comes across as a roguish card, Earl’s wife isn’t given a scrap of humanity, presumably so we can enjoy her ghastly death at Lester’s hands. While screwing her from behind, Lester raises a butcher knife over her exposed back, sloo-o-owly—that’s Dobkin’s idea of suspense. Did I mention the scene is played for laughs? The whole time, Elvis Presley’s “It’s Now or Never” is going in the background, and you slump in your chair because the scene has to drag out long enough for Lester’s and Elvis’ climaxes to coincide.
At the screening I saw, a woman left during that scene and didn’t return. I found out later she’d been attacked at knifepoint and didn’t appreciate the reminder. Her reaction would probably surprise the director and screenwriter, who likely thought their characters were so unrecognizable as human beings we wouldn’t mind seeing them stabbed and shot—hence the title.
Yet it’s that very affectlessness that’s so galling. Violence can indeed be explosively comic in movies—Kurosawa’s Yojimbo comes immediately to mind, as well as Fargo—but not if it’s unmoored from a larger vision of the workings of the world and human behavior. There’s a moral order in evidence in those films—a grimly imperiled humanism—and the best Clay Pigeons can muster is wan irony, glossed over a cold, inert center. Apart from Garofalo’s endearingly morose presence, and a humane character turn as an easygoing sheriff by Scott Wilson—who himself played a thrill killer three decades ago in In Cold Blood—Clay Pigeons is a frozen turkey.
