LaRoy, Texas (2024)
Written and directed by Shane Atkinson
Streaming on Amazon Prime
Southwest noir, which combines road trip sequences, sneering assassins in cowboy hats, and hapless everyman protagonists, is a venerable subgenre. You could look to “Bad Day at Black Rock” (1955) and even “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” (1962), with its modernist sensibilities, as forerunners. You can trace its development to the Peter Bogdanovich pictures “The Last Picture Show” (1971) and “Paper Moon” (1973), and to New Hollywood thrillers like “Bonnie and Clyde,” “The Getaway” (1972), “Charley Varrick” (1971), and “Badlands” (1973). Even “Tremors,” a 1990 monster movie set in the desert, contains elements of these precursors.
But without a doubt, the Coen brothers’ series of small town noir films — beginning with “Blood Simple” (1984), extending through “Raising Arizona” (1987), “Fargo” (1996) and “The Man Who Wasn’t There” (2001), and concluding with “No Country for Old Men” (2007) as the apex — created, developed, and crystalized the tropes that characterize southwest noir: A dry small town, surrounded by sagebrush. Big hats. Sadistic assassins. Quirky small-town residents. A large sum of money that all the characters pursue. Women who punch above their weight, not with their fists but with influence and power. The requisite complex noir plot, and with it, more characters than the typical mystery or thriller.1
“LaRoy, Texas” has all of these, almost to a fault. To save time, let’s describe it as one part “Fargo,” one part “Blood Simple,” and one part “No Country for Old Men,” with sibling rivalty and an extra cowboy hat thrown in.
John Magaro is Ray, who owns the local hardware store with his older, more extroverted brother Junior (Matthew Del Negro). Ray’s wife Stacey-Lynn, a former beauty queen, wants money to open a salon, but the bank won’t finance it because she has no training as a beautician and no experience running a business. Sensing her decreasing lack of interest in him, Ray vows to find the money for her somehow.
Enter Skip, a former friend of Ray’s brother Junior. He appears out of nowhere, overdressed in what we might call formal western wear, with the aim of establishing himself as a private detective. Trying to fake it til he makes it, he positions himself outside the local no-tell motel to take pictures of adulterers, and finds Stacey-Lynn in his telephoto lens. He meets Ray and shows him the pictures, apparently hoping Ray will hire him to investigate. Instead, Ray tells him to get lost. But getting rid of Skip won’t be that easy.
That night Ray positions himself in a bar’s parking lot. He plans to shoot himself, but fate intervenes. A stranger climbs into his passenger seat and hands him a few thousand dollars and an address. “It’s got to be done tomorrow,” the stranger insists, then departs.
The plot gets complicated, as all noir plots do, and to relate the twisting and turning narrative, with its revelations, surpising connections between characters, and layed criminal plans, would take almost as long as watching the film itself. Not only that, but given that the movie follows directions for a southwest noir, you already get the idea of the story. Or you can get the gist from the trailer.
So the question, really, is whether debut writer-director Shane Atkinson does more than the minimum required to illuminate and refine the subgenre with a fresh perspective, whether through an innovative structure, or depth of chracter, or some other aspect that at least suggests a new direction.
The best thing about this film was probably supposed to be Steve Zahn. The reliably entertaining character actor almost always provides, at the very least, fun moments of comic relief whenever he appears in a movie. With his high voice and tremendous physical energy, Zahn commonly projects a sort of whiny out-of-control lunacy that a director has to corral. For me, his greatest role is still as the stoner thug Glenn in the 1998 action-romcom “Out of Sight.” In that movie, director Steven Soderbergh was able to control and focus Zahn’s anarchic energy, and every time he was onscreen he was the best thing in the movie — which, given the breakthrough performances by George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez, is saying a great deal.
In “LaRoy, Texas,” first-time director Atkinson fails this test. He allows Zahn to project beyond the frame — by which I mean that his gaze and his movements aren’t always focused on characters in the scene, but on some point in space above and beyond the camera. The result is that it sometimes feels like he’s doing shtick and not embodying his character, which takes a long time to come into focus. For half the movie I couldn’t remember exactly why Skip was there — why he was meddling in Ray’s marriage, why he sticks to Ray like glue as the plot becomes more complex and Ray’s predicament becomes more and more serious. Eventually the issue becomes clearer: his character’s imposter syndrome. Skip firmly insists he’s a detective, but takes all his cues from detective movies rather than any training or insight in dealing with people. So he ruins interviews, panics, and resorts to using his physical size to bully information out of people. This could have been funny, but much of the time, it isn’t.
No, the real star of the movie is John Magaro as Ray. Magaro is one of those actors who labors unnoticed for a couple of decades in TV and Hollywood until they start appearing in supporting roles that expose their talents and give them a chance to stand out. Magaro’s breakthrough role was in the Oscar-nominated 2023 film “Past Lives,” where he played the husband of star Greta Lee. In both that movie and in “LaRoy, Texas,” the key to the film is Magaro’s character’s humanity. At first he seems like a weak protagonist, underplaying scenes and assigned to a nebbish role. But as the movie goes on and Ray is called on to face the dire situations imposed on him, Magaro projects Ray’s quiet nature as strength. Even as Zahn’s character continues to uncomfortably energize scenes with his uncontrolled tics, Maguro calms and centers the scene.
Without Magaro in the lead role, this movie would have been an uncontrolled disaster. With him, it becomes watchable, if not particularly original. No, Atkinson doesn’t really make it new. Dylan Baker’s take on the requisite sadistic killer is excellent, but once he’s established his character the script doesn’t leave room for surprises. As for Megan Stevenson as Ray’s scheming, unfaithful wife, she starts off as a mere stereotype, and the script leaves her little room, only a few lines where Stevenson is allowed to utter a character-revealing anecdote or truth. The underwritten role, and the movie’s reliance on Zahn’s comedy, don’t give Stevenson enough opportunities for the viewer to determine whether she’s a good actor or not. Maybe?
No doubt Shane Atkinson learned a lot directing this first feature. There’s much that’s technically good about the film from a cinematic perspective, so maybe a second chance is in order. Meanwhile, I’m going to be watching more closely for John Magaro’s future appearances.
Ethan Coen’s “Drive Away Dolls” (2023) is also a take — though it’s set on the East Coast.