Butler's Cinema Scene

“SMALL TOWN MURDER SONGS”  My rating: C+

75 minutes | No MPAA rating

“Small Town Murder Songs” is the sort of minimalist effort I feel I should like more than I actually do.

Ed Gass-Donnelly’s Canadian murder mystery evokes memories of films by Atom Egoyan and other practitioners of Great Northern ennui. It’s small, claustrophobic and at times too self-consciously artsy for its own good.

Yet it has a genuinely sad and disturbing central performance by Swedish actor Peter Stormare (he was the thug operating the wood-chipper in “Fargo”). I’ve often found Stormare’s performances borderline cartoonish, but here he keeps a lid on his character with affecting results.

Stormare plays Walter, a police officer in small-town Ontario. Walter seems to live one of those quietly desperate lives you hear about.

He was reared in a local religious sect (a Mennonite offshoot?) but did something to get himself shunned; his family members now refuse to speak to him unless it’s on official police business.

Peter Stormare in "Small Town Murder Songs"

But Walter still yearns for the comforts of faith and recently was baptized in a mainstream church.

He’s having a comfortable but joyless relationship with a middle-aged waitress (Martha Plimpton). And there are flashbacks to a moment of violence in which Walter delivers a savage beating to an unspecified victim.

Walter’s world is upended when the nude body of a young woman is found just outside town — the first local murder in decades.

The most likely suspect is Steve (Stephen Eric McIntyre), a hairy miscreant often in trouble with the law.  But the lawman must step carefully here, for Steve is now living with Walter’s old flame Rita (Jill Hennessy).  And Rita claims that Steve was with her at the time of the murder.

As murder mysteries go, this one is pretty obvious. Gass-Donnelly is clearly more interested in poking around in Walter’s psyche than delivering a conventional whodunnit.

And his presentational style is, to say the least, attention getting. The film is divided into chapters titled with Biblical admonitions (turn the other cheek, etc.) and a good third of the movie is accompanied by one of the weirdest musical scores ever.

Bruce Peninsula has created a half-dozen or so songs that mix church-choir voices with violent percussion…evidently he’s trying to evoke both Walter’s spirituality and his sometimes uncontrollable anger. Mission accomplished.

Ultimately I found “Small Town Murder Songs”  too emotionally and narratively austere to be truly enjoyable — but it’s a worthy try.

| Robert W. Butler