““Sling Blade,’’ which Thornton wrote, directed and stars in, is so important and personal to him that he’s almost afraid to talk about it. It’s the story of Karl (Thornton), a mildly retarded man who killed his mother and her boyfriend when he was a child and comes out of a mental hospital 25 years later. He returns to his Arkansas hometown and meets Frank (Lucas Black), a bighearted kid who becomes his best friend; Vaughan (John Ritter), a beleaguered homosexual, and Doyle (country singer Dwight Yoakam), an abusive alcoholic. Yoakam and Ritter give image-breaking performances, and Thornton is stellar. Karl walks funny, talks in an eerie grunt and wears his pants too high around his waist, but Thornton gives him the unexpected poignancy of a true hero. ““If you saw Karl, you’d cross the street to avoid him,’’ says Ritter. ““By the end of the movie, you want to hug him.''
With its unflashy editing and slow, deliberate pacing, ““Sling Blade’’ has earned some criticism (The New York Times called it ““indulgently long at 2 hours 13 minutes’’ after it played the New York Film Festival). ““A movie goes at the pace of its lead character,’’ Thornton says defensively. ““You can’t get ahead of Karl’s walk.’’ He also defends the film’s deeply Southern roots. Thornton, 41, grew up in rural Arkansas, in a house without indoor plumbing or electricity. His father was a school basketball coach, his mother a psychic; his grandfather ““was like Daniel Boone. Whatever he killed, that’s what we ate–squirrel, deer, possum, raccoon. We used to kill turtles and make turtle soup.’’ Billy Bob wrote short stories, played drums in bands and headed to L.A. in 1983 to be a writer/actor. He’s had character roles in big movies (““Indecent Proposal’’), little movies (““Dead Man’’) and sitcoms (Ritter’s ““Hearts Afire’’).
His closest call to fame was the 1992 indie hit ““One False Move,’’ which he co-wrote and co-starred in. Given a chance to go Hollywood, Thornton instead went Arkansas. ““It’s a storytelling environment,’’ he explains. ““We have a real pride about that. We’ve come from an area that people have criticized for being slower and not as sophisticated, but we have a whole different kind of sophistication.’’ Which is, Thornton knows, a sophistication of the heart. ““You know what?’’ he says, finally addressing the subject he’s been avoiding. ““I love “Sling Blade.’ It turned out exactly the way I wanted it to. There’s not a false moment in it. These people are very close to me. I wrote it for people I care about.’’ Greater directors have aspired to much less.
