The middle of a movie reveals its character. In the two-part American revenge epic Kill Bill, Michael Madsen arrives at the top of the second film. A Deadly Viper Assassination Squad alumnus, Madsen’s Budd lives in a trailer in the middle of the desert like an Old Testament penitent might.
His brother, David Carradine’s titular Bill—the chairman of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad and ex-husband of our hero, Uma Thurman’s Beatrix Kiddo—pays a visit to Budd in the wasteland. He tells Madsen’s Budd that revenge is coming. It is the most elegiac scene in the two films. Budd has made himself a man on the margins, the only antagonist who carries the weight of what he’s done. Carradine tries to humiliate Madsen over selling a legendary samurai sword. Madsen doesn’t bite. Carradine tries to scare Madsen with a warning about Beatrix’s warpath. Madsen’s Budd knows that they did something terrible when they tried to kill Thurman’s Beatrix on her wedding day. He doesn’t fear death. And then he whispers the line that carries the films’ sentiment:
“I don’t dodge guilt.”
When Thurman and Madsen collide, Madsen’s Budd fights with a strange cowardice. He doesn’t fight her blade for blade or hand to hand. He is smart enough to know that she’d demolish him. He fires shotgun shells loaded with rock salt, enough to stun and sting and smash her into unconsciousness. But he doesn’t want to perforate her. He does bury her alive, but there’s an ambiguity in that. Does he think she might make it out? He knows of her relentless, imperial badassery. Did he give her a chance to survive while still doing what his brother and former patron asked of him? We never know. Madsen is, as the saying goes, wandering in from a different movie. Madsen’s movie was almost always the more interesting one.
Coburn but sad. Bronson but wryer. Another weary, beat-up, sly face from an era in which actors were not necessarily gorgeous children of bankers and academics who plop down in Echo Park fresh from Yale or NYU, dewy and well-funded. Madsen came up through Steppenwolf Theater, because of course he did. He was the child of a brave, independent mother who left a corporate job to be a writer. He was no one. When he got his hand and footprints done outside the TCL Chinese Theater, he said that he “could have been a bricklayer. I could have been an architect. I could have been a garbage man. I could have been nothing. But I got lucky. I got lucky as an actor.”
