Review of Cold in July (2014) by Jack G — 22 May 2014

The power that comes in the first act of Cold in July is this simple notion: movies, more often than not, don't explore what it's like for a normal man to kill someone. Of course, when Michael C. Hall's character Richard kills a man in the first few minutes of this film, it's a home invader, a wanted felon. But he doesn't know that, and at the moment he shoots him in the head neither do we, or what's more to come. It shakes him up, he doesn't walk away like a Clint Eastwood or any other action hero. From the start, I got hooked into Cold in July from the filmmaker Jim Mickle (adapting a book by Joe Lansdale) just showing this basic but direct dramatic conflict, which is amplified by Hall's acting (kind of a contrast to his iconic Dexter character to be sure, where killing someone was as natural as breathing).

But that's not all Cold in July has to offer, oh no sirs. It is actually a piece of pulp fiction which spirals into, ultimately, a climax full of violence and flying bullets all over a kind of reversal of the Hitchcock trope - instead of the 'wrong man' being accused of killing someone as the protagonist, here the protagonist (along with Sam Shepard, who plays the killer's father and an outsider cop, Don Johnson, who I'll get to in a moment) shot the wrong man, but no one is after him for it. In actuality, the cops want to cover up this whole deal, and name the man that Richard killed as Freddy - a man who is actually in witness protection, a part of a sort of Southern-Fried Texas mafia - and his father, who, naturally in the first part of the film, wants revenge, as left for dead.

In the first half of the film we are brought along on this with not a whole lot of dialog, mostly watching as Richard, who is a caring father and loving husband, is in doubt as to what to do next: does he just stay out of the way as Freddy's father Russell teams up with Jim Bob (Johnson) to find out where Freddy really is at and what he's doing, or join them and finding a catharsis of some kind? It's in the second half that Mickle and his co-writer Nick Damici have a little more fun, which is sort of a surprise given the heaviness of the subject matter.

But 'fun' of course is relative. While Johnson, playing a Big Personality (in capital letters) driving a Big Red Convertible, is a cop for the Houston PD but, you know, makes his own sort of time and his own connections (that kind of oddball detective), and is an honest to goodness pig farmer, has a ball on screen, Shepard is still playing a role we've seen him in some films in the past (i.e. I'm thinking Brothers, Out of the Furnace) where he's very grim, a man of few words.

If Hall is to be the everyman protagonist, and playing that very well, Shepard just holds down his scenes without having to do much at all, which is a sign of a gifted actor. At one point Russell finds out the horrible truth about his son via a "home-made" video-cassette that is found in a trunk of a car (how they got to this point of course involved the following-and-ass-kicking that comes sometimes in a down-and-dirty film noir), and he takes a pistol and just sits in a car. At first Richard and Jim Bob are concerned, but really all Russell needs to do is to sit and think. We watch him think, maybe rub his forehead a little bit, and, dramatically speaking, that's enough.

Perhaps I should be a little disappointed that the film becomes such a bloody spectacle by the end after such a realistic set-up, though on the other hand perhaps I should have also known the film was based on a book by Mr. Lansdale, whose stock and trade for many years has been writing stories and novels (mostly noirs and westerns) that have some brutal characters and twisty plots. Cold in July is a no-frills thriller with teeth, and with a feel that doesn't go too fast, and often Mickle's camera will sit and just let us look at our characters, see what they're seeing, and lit in tones of gloom and (since it's the 80's) occasional neon colors. The only nitpick I had really early on, and something I grew to like and fit the tone of the deepening darkness of the film, was some synth music on the soundtrack.

And, best of all, its characters are solid and believable, and while the grisly scenario was playing out in the final act, I kept wondering how, simply, Richard was going to explain this to his wife.