Killer Joe (2011)

Not for the faint of heart, this perverted (rated NC-17) story of a dumb family's hiring a hit man starts out funny and gets increasingly violent. Jack, Judy, Michael, and I ended up groaning and averting our eyes when we saw it yesterday, on the 77th birthday of director William Friedkin (won Oscar for The French Connection (1971); nominated for The Exorcist (1973); also helmed The Boys in the Band (1970); Cruising (1980); To Live and Die in L.A. (1985); the TV movie of Twelve Angry Men (1997) with Hume Cronyn; Jack Lemmon, and George C. Scott; and Rules of Engagement (2000), to name a few).

The cast is great. Matthew McConaughey (last in these pages in Bernie) looks quite comfortable in his big cowboy hat--he is from Texas, after all--and we quite believe him as the twisted title character. Emile Hirsch (covered in Taking Woodstock) gives us the necessary desperation of the idiot drug dealer, Chris, who starts the process. Thomas Haden Church's (profiled in We Bought a Zoo) Ansel is matter-of-fact in his acceptance of outrageousness, and, as his wife Sharla, Gina Gershon (deservedly won the MTV Best Kiss award with Jennifer Tilly in Bound (1996), her breakout role; I also liked her in The Insider (1999), Delirious (2006), and nine episodes of Rescue Me in 2007 and 2009, among others) is perfect as the leggy bottle-black-haired bimbo. But the scenes with McConaughey and Juno Temple (new to me, she had small parts in Atonement, The Other Boleyn Girl (2008), Greenberg, and more. Her parents are Amanda and Julien Temple, the English producer and director, respectively) as Dottie made our skin crawl, partly because we believed it when Dottie tells Joe she is 12. Actually, she's supposed to be 21, which Friedkin discusses in this interview with no spoilers. He delayed shooting until Temple's 21st birthday so it would be legal to have her (among others) get naked in front of the camera.

The opening credits put the screenwriter, Tracy Letts (he won a Pulitzer Prize for August: Osage County), who also wrote the 1991 play on which the screenplay is based, in front of the title along with Friedkin.

Although some folks will think of the 1963 hit song by the Rocky Fellers, and I can't stop humming the Quincy Jones instrumental, neither song is in the soundtrack by Tyler Bates (The Way, Californication). One track is available for your listening pleasure in Playlist 2 on the composer's website, or you can use this link to get to iTunes and listen to previews of each track.

NC-17 movies rarely do well at the box office, but critics give this 76% to audiences' 80 on rottentomatoes, which helped it inch up from 33 to 30 at the box office in its fifth week of limited release (only 60 screens). It's good, but hard to watch and hard to know who will like it.