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What’s Your Favorite Bill Paxton Movie?

American Polymath’s panel of experts spent the past month catching up on their Bill Paxton movies. Has there ever been an actor as simultaneously ubiquitous and anonymous as Paxton?

“Shadows of the Night”
I had to IMDB this one so I didn't mess up. Now, Big Love can't count, even though it has a slick cinematic feel to it. So, I'm going with a short subject. Pat Benatar saw potential in Billy waaaay back. When the Midnight Angel took flight in the music video for “Shadows of the Night,” Bill played the "Nazi Radio Operator."

-Dominick Desjardins

Weird Science
WPIX played this Kelly LeBrock-Anthony Michael Hall-Ilan Michael Smith-Robert Downey Jr-John Hughes-vehicle about six times a month during Bush the Elder’s administration. Paxton cements the film’s status as a high-end teen sex comedy by giving it a memorable villain. The actor’s Texas upbringing inspires his take on “Chet,” a menacing older brother with a love for hell-raisin’ and an array of paramilitary outfits. Chet physically and psychologically terrorizes Gary and Wyatt as try to show their new computer-generated girlfriend around town. Paxton’s character bears a striking resemblance to the townies in Peter Bogdanovich’s Last Picture Show. He also appears to be the model for Bob Mapplethorpe’s older brother in Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket.

-Clayton Trutor

U-571
Bill Paxton has a short role as a U.S. submarine captain in U-571, a film about a German submarine boarded in 1942 by disguised Navy submariners seeking to capture an Enigma cipher machine. The premise is super. The screenplay, scenes, and editing are well done although it’s obvious that the writers and director took their inspiration from Das Boot, Run Silent Run Deep and The Enemy Below. Paxton has little time to develop his character, who provides the skipper-to-XO mentoring his executive officer Matthew McConaughey needs to carry the day. Paxton looks the part but plays the role as a low key, earnest leader. His dying words as he drowns are “Take her down.” I’m guessing that the role was passed on by any number of actors and when they got to Bill, he wasn’t busy.

-Larry Sobotka

True Lies
I’d have to go with Bill's inspired turn as a used-car salesman in True Lies. The idea of a character that pretends to be a spy to seduce bored housewives is great enough, but it's Paxton's performance that takes it home, especially the way his character offers a droll counterpoint to Arnold Schwazanegger's spy-who-pretends-to-be-a-boring-husband.

One of these days I'd like to see if the line "If not for me, do it for your country" works on chicks.

-Mike Gormly

Twister
Caution. Do not cast Bill Paxton in your movie if it has a budget larger than one million dollars. Further Caution. Do not cast Bill Paxton in your movie if the leading lady is a television star with unproven box office appeal. You will lose money. You have been warned.

-Francis Lilley doing business as Llewellyn Wapner

Apollo 13

Every once in awhile, it’s nice to indulge in a story which conveys the sentiment, however delusional in actuality, that America is great, we’re all heroes however small our contribution, that we can salvage triumph from failure and that we never leave a man (or three) behind. The realist in me knows that’s not how the world works, but my inner optimist never quite gives up hope. As such, I generally regard any films that convey such a sentiment as a guilty pleasure.

In that light, Apollo 13 remains one of my favorite movies. Though Bill Paxton plays second fiddle to Tom Hanks for the majority of the film, I still feel compelled to cite it as my favorite Paxton film. The film’s pacing is excellent and the tension is so well manipulated that I never mind, or even seem to notice, the lengthiness of the film.

But the big kicker for me is the near worshipful faithfulness of director Ron Howard to the source material. A small dramatic tweak here or there to be sure. But the fact that the so very American heroics of Apollo 13 aren’t the stuff of Hollywood fiction but rather the film rendering of a real and powerful story seems to comfort my inner optimist.

-Jocelyn Rousey

A Simple Plan

Debasement: Billy Bob Thornton in A Simple Plan

For a film with as wide a distribution as it had, A Simple Plan is refreshingly willing to wade into the spiritual hypoxia of American life. A morality tale on the corrosiveness of greed, it's not a great movie, but it is a good movie and a darkly honest movie. For this I'm grateful. Bill Paxton puts in his usual solid, if a little bland, performance as Hank, a guy who works in a grain store filling bags with, well, I would assume it's grain, and unsuccessfully placating cretinous farmers angry about the possibility of five Mondays in a single month. Brigit Fonda is his pregnant wife Sarah, a librarian's aid with a 1000-yard stare in a library slightly bigger than a bus stop kiosk. Upon the discovery of a satchel of drug money—"The American Dream in a goddamn gym bag!"—things go awry. The black birds of avarice begin to alight. Seems Hank and Sarah weren't all that committed to the Protestant work ethic. Sarah's a little tired of skipping dessert. For me, though, it's Billy Bob Thornton's performance as Hank's older brother Jacob that makes the film remarkable. Thornton received an Oscar nomination for the role, but lost out that year to James Coburn's performance in Affliction. There's no one like Thornton, though. I'll always love his characters from this period. You get the feeling there wasn't a whole lot of daylight between the performance and the man. He seems to be discovering, right there in front of you, depths of self-debasement hitherto unimaginable. There's the mentally disturbed Karl Childers in Sling Blade, of course. But also, to a lesser degree, the redneck Troublemaker come to flatten a church with his bulldozer in The Apostle. For my money, though, Jacob is Thornton's most memorable emanation. It has a feel similar to Linda Manz's voiceover in Days of Heaven. An almost literary quality, unique and utterly personal. Greasy wool knit cap pulled down low, cracked eyeglasses askew and mended with tape, hair hanging limp as live oak moss around his face. And what a face. So ghoulish and ashen, it's like an apparition from Brueghel. There's something almost unhuman about it, at turns patiently simian then rutted with existential horror as he confronts the vacuity of his life. And yet he's the most humane character in the film, able to rise above all the murderous money-grubbing, a man child whose meager range of desires has nothing to do with cash, unless cash can buy him a measure of dignity. Maybe it can. Anyway, he'd settle for a really good simulation. In a difficult scene to watch, Jacob remembers his one girlfriend, from high school, whom he later learned only dated him for a month as part of a bet. Still, Jacob understands her motives, and it remains a fond memory nonetheless: they would hold hands, and, "you know, take walks." He's even grateful for her occasional furtive hellos later in the hallway, well after she'd collected her money. "She didn't have to do that." If ever there was a character who's missed out on the consolations of the American Pastoral, here he is. The performance is uneven, sometimes over the top. But there are intimate, almost painfully honest moments that call to mind one or two of Klaus Kinski's creations, when we feel the almost voyeuristic thrill of glimpsing something obscene, in the strictest sense of the word, something akin to the soul.

-Pete Duval