Mark Reviews Movies: DEATH IN TEXAS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 3, 2021

A series of coincidences, contrivances, and bad plans overtakes the potential of Death in Texas to be about its characters. There's a lot of pain, grief, regret, and uncertainty in this story—some of it obvious and some it, unfortunately and artificially, hidden. We get flashes of those deeper, character-based concerns near the start of writer/director Scott Windhauser's movie, and then, the plot knocks them out of the way.

At the beginning of this tale, Billy (Ronnie Gene Blevins) is granted parole after serving seven years in prison. At first, his crime is kept a secret, which seems like an intentional move to make his possible rehabilitation the focus. Like so much of this story, though, the delayed revelation only exists to create and escalate the conflict later.

Anyway, Billy returns home to live with his mother Grace (Lara Flynn Boyle), who had her son when she was 15 and, for the most part, raised Billy on her own. Quickly, Billy learns that his mother is ill. Her liver is failing, and her doctor (played by Sam Daly) believes Grace only has six months to year before she dies.

A liver transplant is necessary but unlikely. There's another—not "ethical or legal," obviously—option. A doctor in Mexico could obtain a donor organ, but Billy, who doesn't have the money or the probability of getting a job anytime soon, would have to come up with $160,000 to make that happen.

This more or less ends the extent of Windhauser's development of or concern for these characters, although there are plenty more who come into play as Billy goes down a morally murky but still illegal road to getting the cash for his mother. Some opening narration from the protagonist sets up his belief in good and evil—black and white—and his equal belief that most of life is lived in the gray area of morality. The movie isn't subtle about much, and putting forth the central theme right at the top is one of many such instances.

As a character, Billy is theoretically intriguing: a man laden with guilt over his crime and a sense of responsibility for his mother, whose only positive relationship and overtly virtuous trait serve as the reason he becomes entrenched in what, a member of the parole board calls, a "life of crime." It all begins relatively innocently—or, at least, decidedly in that moral gray zone—when he decides to steal money from a local drug dealer. Before he can rob the guy's house, the dealer is dead—shot by Billy during a fight and with a gun pointed at him.

This, of course, won't go unanswered, and soon enough, Billy is on the run and trying to evade the cops, particularly a detective named Asher (John Ashton), and the local manager of a Mexican drug cartel's operations. His name is Reynolds (Bruce Dern), and his henchmen are a trio of "cowboys," who are adept at taking apart things—namely, human bodies.

The rest of the plot has Billy trying to obtain more cash from a few bad guys (He drinks himself into a blackout state, because, from his earlier crime, he knows that will make him violent and it'll dull the guilt). He makes a lot of poor decisions, almost asking to be caught, but that's not a feature of his character or an attempt to generate suspense on Windhauser's part. It's just an overly distracting flaw of a plot that has to keep moving and has to invent as much conflict as possible.

There are moments of more character-focused material here, although they have little to do with Billy. Those scenes are actually between Grace and John (Stephen Lang), a nurse tending to her as she wastes away in the hospital. The dialogue here is a bit on-the-nose (The two characters just dump their respective back stories—although John omits what turns out to be a pretty vital piece of information), but there is a real sense of instant, almost desperate companionship between Grace and John. Both of them are aching, filled with regret, and need someone to understand that. Lang in particular communicates that emotional pain and need in a quiet, understated performance.

This can't last, of course, and yes, John serves this story in a more direct way (It is odd and rather convenient that he recognizes one character from an event in his past but not another). As labored as that revelation is, Windhauser's unwillingness to allow these characters to confront and deal with the consequences on a human level is even more frustrating. Death in Texas would rather get back to its plot, filled with contrivance and more terrible decisions.

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