And just to make certain sure, we are told a heart-rending story of how Karl’s father had once brought to him “a little ol’ baby no bigger than a squirrel” in a shoebox and told him to bury it. So are things set up to justify the ending. The closeness of Karl’s relationship with Frankie - which he summarizes by saying that “He likes the way I talk and I like the way he talks” - extends to a general protectiveness toward him and his mother, who bakes him the first biscuits he has had since childhood, against Doyle. Once again, there are no prizes for guessing what happens. Doyle has a tendency to become violent and abusive when he is drunk, which is often, and he has threatened to kill Linda if she tries to break off their relationship. His father taught him to be a pussy.” Naturally his hatred is fully reciprocated. “Frankie needs all the friends he can get,” he says. Linda is dating a frightful bully called Doyle Hargreaves (Dwight Yoakam) who runs a construction company, is pals with the sheriff, and is fond of making offensive comments to people and then telling them, with a smile, that he is “just kidding you.” He especially hates midgets, antique furniture, homosexuals (like Linda’s boss, Vaughan, played by John Ritter) and “retards,” but he also hates Frankie. Frankie’s mother, Linda (Natalie Canerday) works in a dime store (now called a dollar store) and indulges her little boy, even to the point of allowing him to invite Karl to come and live in their garage. But he gets a job with a small engine repair shop (he is said to be “a regular Eli Whitney with a lawnmower” ) and meets and befriends a small boy called Frankie (Lucas Black) whose father has committed suicide. He returns to his home town but knows nobody there anymore except his father (a cameo role for Robert Duvall), who doesn’t want anything to do with him. Now he says, on being released from the hospital, “I don’t reckon I got no reason to kill nobody.” Thereupon, when his mother had remonstrated with him and so revealed that she was complicit in this intimacy with the other boy, he had killed her too. He “saw red” when he saw this boy on top of his mother and nearly cut his head off with a “sling blade” (“Some call it a sling blade, but I call it a Kaiser blade,” he says - it appears to be some kind of sickle). The lover had been a spoiled rich boy and the chief of those who used to torment and make fun of Karl at the school yard for being strange and slow. Sling Blade by Billy Bob Thornton deserves credit for the acting job of its director and writer, who also plays the principal role, that of Karl Childers, a mentally retarded man in his 30s released from a state institution - the state seems to be Arkansas - after serving twenty years for murdering his mother and her lover when he was a boy.
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