Two magnificent simpletons - in Sling Blade and A Simple Plan - come as
close as you'll get to summing up this mercurial
writer/director/actor, whose films unpatronisingly hitch across
small town America in search of the inarticulate, the desperate, and
the damaged. One False Move remains his finest achievement in writing,
for its collision between lives on and off the beaten track. On the
evidence of Sling Blade he's less good as a director - though
beautifully written, it lumbers - and All The Pretty Horses confirms
this. In front of the camera he slips, at times, into caricature: but
only in the way that gifted actors seem able to do.
