Possibly the gentlest movie about incest and murder ever made. Gael García Bernal stars as Elvis, a man who has just been released from the Navy. He has no one, so he seeks out his father, a man whom he has never met. He discovers the man (played by William Hurt) is an evangelical priest with the perfect American family (wife: Laura Harring; children: Paul Dano and Pell James), and that he doesn't want to acknowledge Elvis as his son. Meanwhile, Elvis starts up a flirtation with his half sister (who doesn't know). We realize quickly that there's something not quite right about the guy mentally. The film plays kind of like a really low key Cape Fear. Except that Elvis seems, for all practical purposes, a really sweet and gentle man. The movie got some flack for its treatment of evangelical Christians, but I can't think of any movie that's more fair about the subject. Sure, William Hurt is kind of a hypocrite, but when he tries to make amends, he's sincere about it. Not much happens in the film, but the characters' relationships are drawn masterfully with few brushstrokes. The acting is excellent (if the film had been better received, Pell James would have been a breakout star), and it has the second best musical score of 2006 (after The Fountain). It's an extremely sad picture, and one that I'm sure will haunt me for a long while afterward. One of the best of the year.
