There are a lot of well worn Southern clichés in Deborah Kampmeier's film - rusty trucks in the yard, bare feet, the drunk no-count daddy, the old swimming hole, and the rise of Elvis using Black Southern music as his own. They are dear and familiar, and provide a good framework to a movie, but it's all a framework. There isn't anything inside to make this film worthwhile.
I imagine that most people are watching and waiting for the infamous rape scene with 12-year-old Dakota Fanning. It requires a lot of slogging through a film that really isn't more than a young girl's obsession with Elvis. It is that obsession that gets her in trouble.
I remember David Morse from "House." I hated him, but he played the character extremely well. Here he is reduced to a drunk that gets hit by lightning and becomes even more of an intellectual cripple. He goes looking for Lewellen (Fanning) one night without a stitch on. Not a good role for a gifted actor.
There are two good messages in this film, and they both come from Afemo Omilami as the kindly black man (another Southern cliché). He shows that the differences between black and white is not related to race, but to class, and he helps Lewellen heal with music. She just spit out words before the rape, and now she can sing with real feeling.
A stranger (Robin Wright Penn) arrives to relieve her of her miserable existence, but there is a cost that I don't think Lewellen realized.
To those who think there might have been too many renditions of Hound Dog in the film. I was in the first grade when that song came out and I remember my babysitter playing it over and over. I certainly heard it more times than it played in the movie.
It was good to hear Jill Scott as Big Momma Thorton, the person who originally recorded Hound Dog.
I imagine that most people are watching and waiting for the infamous rape scene with 12-year-old Dakota Fanning. It requires a lot of slogging through a film that really isn't more than a young girl's obsession with Elvis. It is that obsession that gets her in trouble.
I remember David Morse from "House." I hated him, but he played the character extremely well. Here he is reduced to a drunk that gets hit by lightning and becomes even more of an intellectual cripple. He goes looking for Lewellen (Fanning) one night without a stitch on. Not a good role for a gifted actor.
There are two good messages in this film, and they both come from Afemo Omilami as the kindly black man (another Southern cliché). He shows that the differences between black and white is not related to race, but to class, and he helps Lewellen heal with music. She just spit out words before the rape, and now she can sing with real feeling.
A stranger (Robin Wright Penn) arrives to relieve her of her miserable existence, but there is a cost that I don't think Lewellen realized.
To those who think there might have been too many renditions of Hound Dog in the film. I was in the first grade when that song came out and I remember my babysitter playing it over and over. I certainly heard it more times than it played in the movie.
It was good to hear Jill Scott as Big Momma Thorton, the person who originally recorded Hound Dog.