‘Eye of God’: Tense and Dark in Oklahoma

Does God smile on Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain? Let’s examine the evidence: Mickey Mantle, Will Rogers and J.J. Cale; 168 dead in a terrorist bombing; and the banning of “The Tin Drum.” The question seems open to debate.

Debuting writer-director Tim Blake Nelson seems convinced that the place suffers from deity deprivation, judging by “Eye of God,” a dark little tale that borrows the Genesis story of Abraham and Isaac as its opening conceit but really deserves something out of Revelations. Murder. Madness. Fundamentalist hysteria. And a strain of apocalyptic malevolence running throughout that occasionally blossoms into real tension.

On the other hand, there’s so much flashing (back and forth, forth and back) that the movie should be wearing a raincoat. Time here is a very, very flexible thing, so much so that just keeping track of when and where you are is enough to keep you from noticing how slim the story is. We encounter young Tom Spencer (Nick Stahl) as a happy kid watching TV, then in a post-traumatic catatonia, then as a vaguely unhappy kid, very quickly and without enough immediate detail to establish what’s happening when. It’s not an ineffective technique; when Atom Egoyan does it in the upcoming “Sweet Hereafter,” it works both dramatically and logically. It just doesn’t quite work here.

The other characters are caught up in same space-time discontinuum: Ainsley Dupree (Martha Plimpton), for instance, who’s waiting at the local lunch counter for Jack Stillings (Kevin Anderson), her just-released-from-prison pen pal. Plimpton is marvelously unsure of herself as Ainsley; Anderson is not quite believable (which would be good, if it weren’t the fault of the script) as the born-again ex-con come to sweep her off her feet. Their whirlwind romance ends in a marriage that becomes increasingly oppressive for Ainsley and seems headed for disaster. Except the disaster’s already happened. Or has it?

The acting is uniformly fine, and Nelson exhibits terrific control over the sequence that closes the film. Getting there, however, involves transversing a too-belabored and confusing series of plot pieces, stacked in a rather mad manner. Without the narrative trickery, on the other hand, the story is exposed as a fairly predictable bit of business.

* MPAA rating: R for violence, language and depiction of abortion. Times guidelines: scenes too intense for children.

‘Eye of God’

Martha Plimpton: Ainsley Dupree

Kevin Anderson: Jack Stillings

Nick Stahl: Tom Spencer

Hal Holbrook: Sheriff Rogers

Margo Martindale: Dorothy

Mary Kay Place: Claire Spencer

A Castle Hill production. Director Tim Blake Nelson. Producers Wendy Ettinger, Michael Nelson. Screenplay by Tim Blake Nelson. Cinematographer Russell Lee Fine. Editor Kate Sanford. Costumes Jill O’Hanneson. Music David Van Tieghem. Production design Patrick Geary. Art director Richard “Tudor” Williams. Running time: 1 hour, 24 minutes.

*

* At selected theaters throughout Southern California.