THE KING is a shocking, tasteless, and very intense film about acceptance, revenge, love, and patience. The characters are intensely believable, the overall tone of the film is very dark,and the ending is very abrupt, and definitely will leave you affected. The film gets to be really difficult to watch because the horrible things that happen are handled in such a realistic manner with such a believable naturalness. A man named Elvis(Gael Garcia Bernal) who just got done with the marines returns to his father(William Hurt) who he has never met in hoping that he will be taken in. In finding his dad, who is a baptist minister, he discovers that he has a beautiful family, with a sweet and caring wife(Laura Harring) a beautiful 16 year old daughter(Pell James) and an ambitious son(Paul Dano), and yearns to join it. But his father denies him entry and sends him on his way, telling his family to never talk to him and telling Elvis never to come back and to not see his family ever again. But Elvis doesn't leave and instead gets a local job in the town as a pizza delivery boy. He soon makes regular visits to his father's daughter and begins to develop a sexual relationship with her, with her not even knowing that he is her brother. This sparks a chain of events that lead to tragic consequences for everyone. The film left an awful taste in my mouth and filled me with some disgust. This is definitely not a film for the casual movie-goer. Instead, this film challenged me with it's events and characters and then stopped and left me to deal with what i had just seen. At first, I didn't know what to think of it. I felt like the film had been created by people with talent who had decided to use that talent to create a well made shock film. But the film is too subtle to be considered a shock film. Then I kind of had a strange feeling that it was supposed to be a black comedy. But it was not funny at all. When you take all the content which includes prostitution, murder, incest, and body disposal, it doesn't seem like the kind of thing you can really make funny when it is all put together. And the context of which they were put in was so cold hearted and so realistic that i quickly scrapped that idea before i thought too deep into it. I didn't want to see the film as a comedy and i am glad that i never did. In the end, i came to the conclusion that the filmmakers were trying to craft a film that was twisted, sick, and terribly cruel with out falling into the usual traps to make things more excessive then they should be. This film is disturbing, but it is definitely not excessive at all. It isn't the kind of thing you can just not watch, no matter how much you want to. It is the kind of film that you are drawn into from the very start, and you need to keep watching to know how it ends. It isn't the kind of film that you start watching and then gross weird stuff starts happening in such a manner that you are disgusted with the makers of the film for making the content so hard to swallow. The brutality of the film is tough but not extreme. They are treated with as much sincerity and as much dignity as they normally should, and that is why i think this film works so well. So in conclusion, it's a tough cookie to swallow and the ending will leave you sweating, but the intensity of the characters versus the subtlety of the directing style is so perfect. i definitely love the film and am glad that i watched it. It's so wrong, but it's so right.
