Of course, the presence in the movie of the likes of Robert Duvall, John Ritter, Dwight Yoakum, and J.T. Walsh indicates that there was a certain in-group high seriousness associated with Sling Blade from the very beginning. Clearly, it was destined to be at the very least a cult film; that it got somewhat further in the world’s estimation is an indication of how well it transcends its built-in limitations.

When we first see a young middle-aged Carl, he is presented as a backwoods “retard,” who has just been pronounced cured and is being released from the state hospital, where he landed as a young boy after hacking to death his mother and her lover when he mistook their furtive coupling for something else. We learn all this from Carl himself in a monologue that sounds in part like a Writer’s Workshop dissertation read aloud and serves also to introduce us to Carl’s characteristic tics – a ritualistic “Mmmmm, hmmmm” that allows him to play Greek chorus to himself and the periodic verbal refrain “All right, then.” In between these sounds, he manages to get out a fair share of homespun apercus and some self-conscious-sounding gag lines. (“Are you well now?” asks a character to whom he has confessed the circumstances of his incarceration. “I feel all right. Mmmmm, hmmmm,” he replies.)

Add to this Carl’s studiedly hunchbacked posture, mechanical loping gait, and prognathously out-thrust jaw, and you have the makings of a caricature – Forrest Gump meets Texas Chain-Saw Massacre.

Except that the people and the situations of Sling Blade, even when most cartoony, resonate with depths beyond the ordinary and the obvious, the same way as do the grotesqueries in the short stories of the late great Flannery O’Connor.