A darkly comic crime odyssey set in middle-of-nowhere America, writer-director Shane Atkinson’s LaRoy, Texas wears its Coen brothers influence on its sleeve. And while it never quite reaches the hilarious heights or existential depths of the Coens’ finest work, it does offer similarly enjoyable mixture of the macabre and the absurd.
Atkinson’s film begins with a regular schmuck named Ray (John Magaro) being summoned to a greasy diner and handed an envelope full of photos that show his wife, Stacy-Lynn (Megan Stevenson), cheating on him. It’s devastating information to receive, and it doesn’t help that Ray is hearing it from a guy like Skip (Steve Zahn)—a self-styled private eye who dresses in a bolo tie and cowboy hat, and swears that he’s as much of a detective as any of the other boys on the force, even if he has spelled the word incorrectly on his business cards.
This is the sort of film where the most serious things seem to happen in the most ridiculous ways. Distraught at what he’s learned, Ray buys a handgun and drives off to a nice, quiet spot to end it all. But as he sits in his car, preparing to pull the trigger, he’s mistaken for a hired killer, handed a name along with a bunch of money, and told to get the job done by tomorrow.
A story that begins with a poorly chosen parking spot quickly snowballs into a bloody tale of betrayal, deception, and revenge. The murder that Ray has been asked to carry out turns out to be just a small part of a larger criminal conspiracy that he and Skip set out to investigate. Of course, everyone else in LaRoy, Texas turns out to be running some angle of their own, and none of them are criminal masterminds. Their schemes are greedy, obvious, and ill-thought-out—sordid, stupid attempts to make a quick buck. If only Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson was here to remind them that there’s more to life than a little bit of money.
The one person of real integrity in LaRoy, Texas is the man whose job Ray accidentally stole, Harry (Dylan Baker). He’s an actual hitman whose commitment to finishing things quickly puts him on Ray and Skip’s trail. Although he looks like a math teacher and evinces the dorky gentleness of a man you could threaten with a tablespoon, this wobbly exterior is just a ruse, hiding the cold-hearted killer underneath. It’s like if Mister Rogers was secretly going around capping people, and Baker plays both sides of the character with conviction.
And at the center of it all is Ray. With his plaintive eyes and hangdog expression, Magaro was made for the sort of hapless protagonists that populate so many films by the Coens brothers and their imitators. He has the saddened look and shrunken demeanor of a man who life has kicked from every direction. Ray’s wife openly loathes him, his big brother, Junior (Matthew Del Negro), big-times him at every opportunity, and even the employees of their family-owned hardware store don’t take him seriously. He’s the sort of character you wish would catch a break, although he probably wouldn’t know how to enjoy it if he did.
Although it has a lot of very good pieces in place, LaRoy, Texas lets itself down a little with a meandering final third. It successfully sets up a whole cast of quirky characters and sets them chasing after the same goal—a missing pile of money connected to the man Ray was asked to kill—but it doesn’t bring it all to a head quite forcefully enough. The finale doesn’t register as a cosmic punchline or a tragic gut-punch, just a kind of gradual tapering out.
Still, Magaro’s sympathetic—or just plain pathetic—hero is winningly paired with Zahn’s Skip, another down-on-his-luck guy who nobody really respects, only one propelled by an inexhaustible, somewhat inexplicable well of self-confidence. As detectives, they don’t make for a capable duo, but watching them bluff and blunder their way through the case is a lot of fun.
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