Review of Jayne Mansfield's Car

I don't know, I kind of liked this picture even if it does seem to ramble it's way along with a host of disconnected scenes. It's got a stellar cast, and does a fairly good job of demonstrating the dysfunction within two disparate families from opposite sides of the Atlantic. Robert Duvall portrays the redneck patriarch of the Caldwell clan, left to pick up the pieces of a failed marriage some twenty years earlier when his wife left for a life of adventure and wound up marrying a Brit. Her dying wish was to be buried back home in Alabama, thus instigating a clash of cultures that nevertheless has a way of slowly bonding the individual members to each other in different ways. The 'Jayne Mansfield' connection to the story is tenuous at best, as the dead actress's car winds up at a local auto show to be admired by an adoring public. Given the title, it might have been a good idea to cast Mariska Hargitay for the picture, but that wasn't the case (you can look it up). Perhaps the oddest character in the story was portrayed by Ron White, as all he had to do was a version of his stand-up routine and he was home free. The guy can be caustic and uproariously funny all at the same time. The oddest thing for me to wrap my head around was the idea that Billy Bob Thornton, Kevin Bacon and Robert Patrick are about the same age, and would all be young enough to be Robert Duvall's progeny. At eighty nine as I write this, he's still my favorite modern day actor.