'Jayne Mansfield's Car' International Trailer: Billy Bob Thornton's All-Star Family Drama

Some months ago, before shooting his latest film Jayne Mansfield's Car, Billy Bob Thornton said that there just aren't many movies being made lately that are really of interest to him. And indeed, the first trailer for his latest, which stars Thornton, Robert Duvall, John Hurt, Frances O'Connor, Ray Stevenson, Robert Patrick, and what looks like a draft-dodging Kevin Bacon, makes the film look like a pretty controlled, even old-fashioned family drama the likes of which we don't often see.

That's not a bad thing, at least as an absolute, though in this particular case the film doesn't look like the liveliest thing around. But there are good performance moments in this trailer, which arrives thanks to a DVD release that hits there early next year. Thornton's '60s-set drama is rooted in the South and revolves around a family reunited for a funeral; see some of what he put together, below.

After checking that out, some early comments from Robert Duvall might help explain what's up:

It's about a guy in between WWI and WWII who raises a family after his wife left him for an Englishman and moved to England...When the wife dies, she asks to be brought back to Alabama to be buried, and at that point the character hasn't seen her in 20 or 30 years. The two families — her original family she abandoned and her English family — meet and then things get really interesting.

There is no US distribution deal for Jayne Mansfield's Car at this point, but we still might see the film sometime in the coming year. [Le Blog Du Cinema via The Playlist]