Chrystal

Billy Bob Thornton, who played a somber ex-con searching for redemption in the slow-moving Levity (VL-9/03), does so again in Ray McKinnon's equally ponderous bit of Southern Gothic melodrama. Here Thornton is Joe, who returns to the Arkansas backwoods to re-establish a relationship with his wife (Lisa Blount), who was terribly injured in a car crash (with Joe at the wheel smuggling drugs) two decades earlier, an accident that also took the life of their young son. Chrystal is undoubtedly well-intentioned, and it features some striking performances, not only by Thornton and Blount but also by costars McKinnon, Grace Zabriskie, and Harry Dean Stanton. But it's crippled by McKinnon's desire to give the story a mythic quality: in an effort to elevate material that could easily have become melodramatic, he's directed the action at a virtually glacial pace, entombing the story rather than dramatizing it. Ultimately, what might have been a serious study of loss, guilt, and moral repayment becomes a tedious exercise in artsy photography and self-indulgent pontificating. Optional. (F. Swietek)