There are only a handful of other revenge flicks that I could think of that does their business with such economy and effectiveness. But I can't think of another one that went to the bother of creating a goddamn other movie, with its own resonant themes and mechanics, before finally getting bloody. Maybe I'm overstating it, from the start to the end you can sense that Devane's and TLJ's emotional antenna's are screwy. Devane is tense when he should be relaxed and happy, relaxed when he should be livid. They're messed up, and something the movie subtly nudges you to notice from the first lines of the movie. Its fun matching Devane's sunglasses use and his restrained public persona.
Heywood Gould is fantastic. He wrote another movie I like (though its not anywhere as good as this one) called
Fort Apache the Bronx, a conventional buddy cop movie starring Paul Newman that manages to rise above itself by allowing its characters to breathe between the typical action cop beats. The
link from earlier in the thread, shows what Heywood provided, the emotional heft to Devane's family scenes, the killer lines that just pop, the shed scene, basically all the great stuff in the movie. It's even more impressive against Schrader's first draft, which I'm just getting into, but already displays his tendency for overindulgence and political hay-making.
Rolling Thunder is a great example for the idea that its better to use a word instead of a sentence to express something, or better yet, nothing at all.
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