Taglines: Evil is patient.
Flesh and Bone movie storyline. A family in rural Texas finds a boy, Arlis, who says he is lost. They take him into their home, feed him, and give a place to sleep. But the boy later lets his father, Roy (James Caan), into the house to commit a robbery. When they are discovered, Roy brutally murders the family, which the boy witnesses. The sole survivor is a baby girl.
Time passes, and Arlis (Dennis Quaid) lives a solitary life in which he drives a truckload of goods and novelties to restock vending machines and arcade games in roadside stores and restaurants. Making a stop at a roadhouse where a rowdy party is being held, he spots Kay (Meg Ryan), a woman who pops up out of a cake at the party and then passes out because she had been imbibing liquor.
Arlis ends up giving her a ride home, a long drive, while continuing to make his rounds. Upon coming home, Kay sees that her husband Reese has sold the furniture, having lost their money gambling. She packs up her remaining belongings and leaves with Arlis. They spend more time together and grow close.
Meanwhile, a young woman named Ginnie (Gwyneth Paltrow) now travels with a much older Roy. She is a grifter who will pretend to be a mourner in order to steal the jewelry from a dead body at a funeral home. Ginnie brings an injured Roy to his estranged son, Arlis, to tend to his injury.
Passing the house where he grew up, Arlis comes to realize that Kay was the infant who survived the long-ago murders. Roy figures this out as well. He begins talking about tying up loose ends. It leads to a confrontation, and Arlis shoots Roy dead. Ginnie goes off on her own, and Kay and Arlis go their separate ways.
Flesh and Bone is a 1993 neo noir film drama written and directed by Steve Kloves that stars Meg Ryan, Dennis Quaid and James Caan. Gwyneth Paltrow is featured in an early role. Janet Maslin of The New York Times described Paltrow as a scene-stealer “who is Blythe Danner’s daughter and has her mother’s way of making a camera fall in love with her.”
Film Review for Flesh and Bone
“Bone” isn’t a word that often turns up in movie titles. As used by the writer and director Steve Kloves in “Flesh and Bone,” it suggests something tough, ominous and strikingly deliberate, qualities that perfectly capture the mood of Mr. Kloves’s transfixing second feature. Although this film’s story and setting locate it light-years away from “The Fabulous Baker Boys,” his earlier romance steeped in world-weary diffidence and late-night glamour, these two films have a lot in common. They share the sharp stylistic imprint of a young film maker who is no longer merely going places. He has arrived.
Mr. Kloves happens to make films — he also wrote “Racing With the Moon” (1984) — but he thinks like a novelist. He creates original stories out of whole cloth, with a novelist’s ability to interweave narrative threads, sustain haunting symmetries and look deep into his characters’ hearts. That aspect of his talent is especially clear in “Flesh and Bone,” which doesn’t match the sultriness of “The Fabulous Baker Boys” but tells a much more ambitious story. It begins with a heart-stopping prologue set in an isolated Texas farmhouse. This house, seen twice during the story, provides the film with a set of dramatic bookends, and with a near-biblical sense of right and wrong.
As Philippe Rousselot’s camera singles out critical details — a worn cradle, a suspicious dog, a china closet full of valuables, a shotgun — this near-silent prologue unfolds. A strange boy appears at the farmhouse late at night, and is taken in by the Willets family: stern father, pretty young mother, infant daughter and school-age son. The lost boy reveals nothing about himself, but the mother notices a star-shaped tattoo at his hairline. “Who’d do such a thing to a boy?” she asks in astonishment. Mr. Kloves has a precise way of guiding his viewers’ attention with questions like that one. His spare, lively screenplay is free of stray remarks.
It is soon apparent who would do that and even worse things to the boy, once his father, Roy Sweeney (James Caan), steals onto the scene. The farmhouse episode ends devastatingly, with no image more troubling than the stony face of young Arlis Sweeney (Jerry Swindall) as he witnesses the full extent of his father’s cruelty. The adult Arlis (Dennis Quaid) has broken away from Roy, but he still wears the same guarded look, as if he has spent his whole life trying to insulate himself from the memory of his childhood. “Flesh and Bone” is about what happens when that memory reasserts itself once and for all.
Once again, Mr. Kloves comes up with an offbeat line of work for his hard-bitten hero: Arlis supplies vending machines, riding across Texas with a truckful of novelties and a schedule like clockwork. He doesn’t like surprises, and he doesn’t have or want a home. He’s more comfortable with pastel-dyed chickens that play tick-tack-toe (a vending-machine specialty) than he is with people. But the story flings him together with Kay Davies (Meg Ryan), another footloose type, and sends the two of them on the road together. Their meeting would have the look and feel of a coincidence in any other film, but this one ascribes rare powers to the long arm of Fate.
Kay Davies, a feistier variation on Michelle Pfeiffer’s Susie Diamond in the earlier film, very nearly throws “Flesh and Bone” off balance. Ms. Ryan is an actress who can flounce petulantly in a fringed satin bikini, and her perkiness threatens to turn this into a tale of lovable eccentrics, Texas style. But her performance proves to be more muted than it seems at first, when Mr. Kloves provides her with a memorable entrance jumping out of a cake (falling out, actually). Even here, when Arlis gets his first partial glimpse of Kay, the details are sharp and evocative: a jug of whiskey, a cigarette and an outstretched hand gloved in white lace.
The arrival of Kay is not as irrelevant to Arlis’s story as it may seem. “Flesh and Bone” hinges on the experience shared by these two, an experience that remains clearer to the audience for a while than it is to the characters. Part of the story’s interest lies in Arlis’s process of discovery, and in his trying to understand just how fully his future must be shaped by his past. These revelations are given more urgency when the free-floating ominousness that pervades the story re-emerges in the form of Roy Sweeney, whose presence Arlis has somehow sensed from a distance. It’s in keeping with the film’s title that the blood tie between father and son is visually reaffirmed, quite literally, as soon as they meet.
There are stars and old wounds and other motifs to hold the story together, as well as the stunning, open landscapes against which this deliberately claustrophobic tale unfolds. (Mr. Rousselot can make the inside of a seedy motel room look as spectacular as a waving wheatfield, and he has the chance to photograph both. The film’s forboding mood is also greatly enhanced by Thomas Newman’s score.)
But most of what keeps “Flesh and Bone” so gripping is the ways in which the characters themselves evolve. Mr. Quaid has the difficult role of a man defined more by what he can’t do than by what he can. But he performs with affecting restraint, and with a deep, believable sense of how badly Arlis has been damaged. Together, he and Ms. Ryan eventually convey the full weight of the story, even if Mr. Kloves cannot allow them to rise above it. Like “The Fabulous Baker Boys,” this film ends honestly but stops short of the transcendent leap it needs.
Mr. Caan is effectively unnerving, thanks to some of the screenplay’s most menacing dialogue and to his truly otherworldy calm. The fourth and strangest of this story’s principals is Ginnie, a young scavenger whose larceny sets the story in motion and who eventually hooks up with the other three. Ginnie is played with startling aplomb by the scene-stealing Gwyneth Paltrow, who is Blythe Danner’s daughter and has her mother’s way of making a camera fall in love with her.
Ginnie can look as girlish as Kay while surpassing Roy when it comes to ruthlessness; one of her favorite gambits is pretending to be a mourner and stealing jewelry from the dead. “I’ll have to watch my back with this one,” Roy tells Arlis about Ginnie. “Heart beats about twice a minute.” “Least it beats,” Arlis answers his father.
Flesh and Bone (1993)
Directed by: Steve Kloves
Starring: Dennis Quaid, Meg Ryan, James Caan, Julia McNeal, Ron Kuhlman, Barbara Alyn Woods, Gwyneth Paltrow, Joe Berryman, Meg Ryan, Gerardo Johnson
Screenplay by: Steve Kloves
Production Design by: Jon Hutman
Cinematography by: Philippe Rousselot
Film Editing by: Mia Goldman
Costume Design by: Elizabeth McBride
Set Decoration by: Samara Schaffer
Art Direction by: Charles William Breen
Music by: Thomas Newman
MPAA Rating: R for language, some sexuality and a scene of intense violence.
Distributed by: Paramount Pictures
Release Date: November 5, 1993
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