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“Eye of God” was based on writer/director Tim Blake Nelson’s stage play of the same name, and it feels like it. I kept thinking it was a movie where the writing mattered more than the direction. And though I might have liked to see Nelson visualize information a little bit more, he is, nonetheless, up to something here, indulging in an understated style with a point. This 1997 crime drama, one that doesn’t seem to have been in theaters long, and that I somehow never rented despite it being released back in those days when I rented almost everything, but currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, is one of my favorite kinds of movies. Like, say, “Cold Weather,” or “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Eye of God” does not lock into place until the last shot.
The almighty U.S. Economy might have been strong in 1997, but it doesn’t seem to have shown up in little Kingfisher, Oklahoma, the kind of place where people only stop for a burger on their way to somewhere else. The local burger joint is where Ainsley Dupree (Martha Plimpton) works and this sensation of being nowhere explains why she might strike up a pen pal relationship with an inmate, Jack (Kevin Anderson), evasive on what put him behind bars and just released as the movie opens. Ainsley sports a glass eye, unnecessary symbolism for her lack of vision given that Plimpton so quietly lives and breathes it, not mere innocence but willful self-deception. And the way she has her character acknowledge that self-deception with a romantic smile on her face genuinely aches.
Jack has been reborn in prison as a fundamentalist, and yet for all her sunniness, Ainsley is not one for God, owing to a hardscrabble past, a dad who died young. These notions of religious questioning are embedded in “Eye of God’s” other storyline, one involving Sheriff Rogers (Hal Holbrook) who struggles with his own uncertainty of faith, doubting whether God is really up there and watching over us, all of which is put to the test when he finds 14-year-old Tom Spencer (Nick Stahl) wandering down the middle of the road one night covered in blood.
It eventually becomes clear that Tom wandering down the road in blood is not the beginning of this story but the end. That non-linear approach is not merely utilized to dress up the obvious, however, but to infuse a sense of inexorability rather than suspense. Indeed, Nelson’s aesthetic is wholly restrained to a point of near frustration until you realize it’s his overriding strategy. Even the single most terrifying moment, when Jack snaps and puts his hands to Ainsley’s throat, is recounted in a shot from the side that feels eerily free of judgement and evocative of the detached tone that Nelson favors to imbue a sense of God’s absence, or maybe just indifference. In the concluding shot, though, he answers that question with one shift of the camera, so simple yet so profound that it took my breath away.
