Butler's Cinema Scene

Teresa Palmer and Liam Helmsworth

“CUT BANK”  My rating: C+ 

93 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Cut Bank” is a slice of country noir that despite an interesting cast and an array of eccentric characters still feels like a slice of warmed-over Tarantino.

Parts of it clicks. But the overall chemistry — that delicate blend of darkness and laugh-out-loud weird — lies just outside TV director Matt Shakman’s grasp.

In tiny Cut Bank, Montana — notorious as the coldest place in the continental U.S. — grease jockey Dwayne (a blah Liam Hemsworth) is out in a field of flowering canola videotaping

John Malkovich

his high school girlfriend Cassandra (Teresa Palmer) when his camera records something unexpected in the background.

About 100 yards off a mail truck has stopped on the roadside.  The driver (Bruce Dern) gets out and walks toward a man approaching on foot. The man raises his hand, a shot is fired and the mail carrier falls.

The young lovers flee, then show the video to her sour-dispositioned father (Billy Bob Thornton) and the local sheriff (John Malkovich). The latter is so upset (it’s the town’s first homicide ever) that he immediately heads for the bathroom to throw up. Turns out this will be his ritual every time he encounters a corpse.

But when the lawman visits the crime scene there’s no mail truck and no body.

Michael Stulbarg

Among the eccentric characters populating this little thriller are Oliver Platt as a U.S. postal inspector sent to look into the slaying of a postman (and perhaps bestow a fat reward on the witnesses), a 7-foot mute Native American with waist-length hair, and a local recluse who was expecting a parcel on the missing mail truck and launches his own investigation into the mystery.

This bizarre figure is played by a nearly unrecognizable Michael Stuhlbarg (perhaps best known as Arnold Rothstein on HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire”), who blends Norman Bates weirdness (he’s a taxidermist) with singleminded obsessiveness (think a variation on Stephen Root’s sad sack character in “Office Space”) and an unexpected streak of violence (the guy employs his own version of Spock’s Vulcan death grip).

Roberto Patino’s screenplay is filled with narrative reverses — for example, characters who are supposed to be dead reappear — and noose-tightening suspense as an outlandish plot starts to disintegrate.

Close, but no cigar.

| Robert W. Butler