A movie like Kalifornia pretty much breaks people down in two categories. On one side, you have the people who have a moral and ethical code that prevents them from doing things that might harm people. Then, you have people who will just do something no matter who it harms. The protagonist, Brian Kessler (David Duchovny), discusses in a voice-over a childhood trip to the Empire State Building where he was told if he tossed a penny off the side it would kill someone on the ground below. He was tempted but didn’t do it.
Early Grace (Brad Pitt), on the other hand, would without a second thought. The movie even opens with Early tossing a huge rock over an overpass on to a car below where a middle-aged man has offered a ride to a young woman who’s walking in the rain. Early does it just out of amusement to see what happens. He later takes the woman’s red high heels which he gives to his girlfriend, Adele Corners (Juliette Lewis), a very gullible young woman who has a child-like mentality.
Early didn’t kill the motorist and hitchhiker for the shoes. He killed them to see if he could kill them. The red high heels was a bonus. Later, when he goes to the outrageously run-down diner Adele works as a waitress, he notices a bug crawling across the counter and flicks it on to the fryer just because he wanted to see it. Early is a dangerous man. And his relationship with Adele is one of control. Adele mentions they don’t eat breakfast because of a conspiracy by the cereal industry but Early keeps Adele from eating breakfast because he wants to control her.
Brian, on the other hand, seems to live with his girlfriend, Carrie Laughlin (Michelle Forbes) in a c’est la vie lifestyle of yuppie leftist/liberal avant garde decorum. When he comes home, she’s drunk looking over pictures she took that have a Richard Mapplethorpe vibe and Brian doesn’t even flinch when he notices some of the photos are of her nude in sexual positions with a black man.
Brian is an aspiring writer who wants to write a book about some of the greatest serial killers of recent times. But as he expains at a cocktail party, he believes most serial killers were the products of poor environment, bad parenting, domestic abuse and nurture. However, both he and Carrie aren’t getting through to the “intellectuals” where they live so they want to move to California where they can live. The movie never really indicates where they are but Early has a Kentucky license plate on his car. However, much of the movie was film in the metro Atlanta area and surrounding communities. You can notice signage throughout the movie. My guess would be they live in Louisville.
Regardless the movie could be a parody of both yuppies and hillbillies if it didn’t show how similar the two couples are yet despite being from different backgrounds. Early seems to be the dominant one in his relationship while Carrie whose androgyne appearance makes her the dominant one over Brian who is more passive. Carrie has short hair and wears mostly black pants and shirts. She chain smokes cigarettes and speaks her mind.
Despite her opposition, she goes along with a ride-share idea that Brian creates to get across the country to California by having someone help pay for the gasoline. Early, who is on parole, is set up by his parole officer to take a janitor job at the college. Brian says Early was the only one who responded to the posting on the bulletin board. Any guess he probably took the posting down immediately after seeing it as they are in danger of being evicted and the parole officer is threatening to have his parole revoked?
Carrie objects when seeing Early and Adele but Brian tells her to keep an open mind. He sees them indifferently while Carrie calls them “Okies” which is an in-joke since Pitt was born in Oklahoma. But Adele also says she thinks Brian and Carrie are weird. It shows you how peope have different perspection. As Donny and Marie Osmond sung, “I’m a little bit country and I’m a little bit rock-and-roll.”
Despite Early’s uncouth behavior, they seem to get along at first. I get the feeling Carrie feels empathic toward Adele’s predicament, especially when she says Early beats her “only when she deserves it.” On the second or third night, they bond more. Early and Brian go out to a nearby bar while Adele and Carrie stay back and Carrie helps style her hair and they also drink. At the bar, some locals try to intimidate Brian but Early steps in to beat them up and you can sense that Brian is fascinated by Early’s lawlessness.
The next day as he’s battling a hangover, Carrie driving the car, notices that Early has a semi-automatic handgun in his possession. The gun was quite possibly taken off the landlord who the police have found buried back in Kentucky. Early even wears the landlord’s ring. Stopping in an open field, Early teaches Brian how to fire a handgun and you can tell he’s enjoying his first time like a kid with a new toy. Brian seems to enjoy this side of himself and the rush he is feeling.
Carrie who remains distant and opposed to Early at one point becomes fascinated when she observes Early and Adele having sex in the back of the car while they are stopped at a location where a serial killer’s murder happened. Earlier in the movie, Brian and Carrie have sex in the privacy of their motel room as Early listens next door. But Carrie seems intriqued by the openness of the two and even starts taking pictures until Early spots her and continues but more rougher with Adele.
Eventually Brian and Carrie learn of Early’s true nature when Carrie spots a news report showing gas station security footage where Early killed a rude rich motorist in the bathroom and stole his money. When he holds the gas station attendant at hostage, the attendant tries to appeal to Early’s conscience by wanting to hold his Bible. But it doesn’t work on Early, who shoots him dead.
Now knowing Early’s true nature, Brian and Carrie find themselves hostage as they continue on the road with Adele trying to deny that anything bad has happened. In the end, like a lot of these movies, Brian will have to resort to his animal instincts to stop Early even if it means brutally killing him. And while it seems Early is smitten with Carrie, he can never really do much to her except touch her breasts and buttocks over her clothes because he sees her as the dominant one.
In the epilogue, Carrie has changed her appearance, growing her hair out longer and wearing a sweater that gives off a more femine look. It’s almost ironic she saw California as a way to be with more people like her but became to reveal more of a submissive woman. As for Brian, who thinks Early’s violent tendecies are causing by childhood trauma, he finally learns why most people kill – because they can or they have to. In the end, he has to kill Early.
Kalifornia opened in September of 1993 and quickly faded from the theaters. Critics were polarized with it. While Siske and Ebert praised it, other critics bashed it. It was the first feature movie of Dominic Sena who had directed only music videos prior. Pitt took the role as a way to break away from the “pretty boy” image that had been created. In 1992, Robert Redford directed him in A River Runs Through It with many people drawing comparisons between Redford and Pitt. Lewis, who was dating Pitt at the time of filming, said on her Instagram page that Pitt was still apprehensive on taking a role but with encouragement by Lewis, signed on and was glad he did.
It is one of Pitt’s most better roles if not as memorable. There’s nothing at all likeable about Early but we’re left wondering how he got to be the way he is. He wears a ball cap with the Confederate Rebel flag emblem but that’s about as common as seeing people on Wall Street wearing Rolexes. When criticizing Carrie’s photos, he mocks a photo of a man in a Ku Klux Klan hood saying, “That’s my daddy!” Is Early a racist? The gas station attendant who approaches Early after killing the man in the bathroom is black but Early is courteous to him as he pays for the gas. Yet, there’s also something fascinating about Early. While he’s often lying to Adele about breakfast (probably something he read or heard) and how California allows one-month rent free, Brian is amused when Early tells him about the “doors” to another dimension.
Adele is probably the most sympathetic character. Lewis who had already been appearing in TV and movies and had an Oscar nomination for Cape Fear was only 18 and she gives off their childish vibe perfectly. It was also Forbes’ first role in a movie even though she had been in TV as well for many years. Despite her avant garde persona, I think she represents the audience’s viewpoint of how knowing that Early and Adele are bad news almost immediately and not giving them the benefit of the doubt Brian does.
Duchovny had been appearing in movies, mostly supporting roles and on TV in Showtime’s soft-core series Red Shoes Diaries. But it’s odd this is his first movie where he’s the lead. Like a lot of his famous characters (FBI Agent Fox Mulder and writer Hank Moody), he’s perfect as the gullible Brian. Just as Mulder believes in conspiracies, Brian believes there’s a simple reason to everything as long as people keep an open mind. It’s one thing to be an arm-chair researcher/writer like others, regurgitating what has already been reported and wrote about ad nauseam. It’s another to almost be the victim.
I heard a statistic that the average law-abiding citizens crosses paths, either through business transactions or just walking past someone on the street or in the store, with a murderer 36 times within the normal life span. I went to school with four people who are spending the rest of their lives in prison on murder convictions. Two of which I’m not surprised that’s where they ended up. Another I was very surprised because we were in Cub Scouts together and even went to birthday sleepovers.
A woman on TikTok posted a video that her father came close to being the first victim of Jeffrey Dahmer. Her father jogged regularly in his youth but had an injury that prevented him from running. The route he jogged took him by Dahmer’s childhood home in the Milwaukee area. Dahmer had said that he had seen this jogger numerous times and planned to kill him, even hiding with the intention to kill him. But Dahmer’s first known kill was an 18-year-old hitchhiker Steven Hicks.
You never know when you shake someone’s hand will it eventually be used to end another’s life. Or has it already?
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 