KEYS TO TULSA

KEYS TO TULSA recounts one really bad week in the life of Richter (Eric Stoltz), the elder son of society matron Cynthia Boudreau (Mary Tyler Moore). Ostracized from society some years ago for sleeping with the daughter of Tulsa power broker Harmon Shaw (James Coburn), Richter has managed to get hired as a movie reviewer at the Tulsa Journal because of his mother’s connections.

However, things aren’t going well for Richter: his electricity gets shut off; he is missing deadlines; his high-school friend, Keith, is suicidal; and, Keith’s estranged sister, Vicki, who was Richter’s high school girlfriend, comes back into his life promising love, but actually still attached to her low-life husband, Ronnie (James Spader), and their boy.

Because he doesn’t think clearly when he is with Vicki, he lets her volatile husband, Ronnie, intimidate him. Ronnie wants to blackmail someone with photographs of a rich Tulsan’s son clubbing a black stripper to death. Another stripper named Cherry took the photographs. Ronnie demands that Richter take care of Cherry at Keith’s mansion, while Keith leaves town to “lay low”.

In the process, Cherry falls for Richter, who starts suspecting that his old friend, Keith, must be the murderer. Richter and Cherry soon begin to have sex. Richter then learns that the stripper’s murderer actually is Bedford Shaw, son of the Tulsa power broker. Keith returns to subject Vicki to a sadistic game of Russian Roulette, as he tortures her for spite. Meanwhile, Richter’s disaffected mother invites him to her second wedding reception, then evicts him from the lodgings she provided.

Finally, in a last-minute revelation, Richter learns that the murderous subject of Ronnie’s blackmail scheme is not Keith, but another rich man’s son (not Bedford Shaw). In collusion with Vicki, Ronnie, Keith, and Cherry, Richter manages to kill the murderer in “self defense”, and Richter and the stripper escape to Mexico.

The movie is being promoted as an ensemble piece examining the “hypocritical values and petty jealousies of the town where Richter never grew up.” However, KEYS TO TULSA is more like a putrid immersion into what jaded Hollywood denizens would like to think is the hidden truth about a middle American town known for its strong Christian community and conservative social values. The movie certainly shows what big problems people have if they have no respect for God, for law or for Biblical morality. However, it is hard to understand how any self-respecting city, especially Tulsa, would give its keys to this production. (It was actually filmed in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.)

Eric Stoltz says that his character, Richter, “is struggling to be a decent person amidst all these lunatics and drugs, and hookers. He’s just a person who’s struggling to find some moral center in his life, amidst chaos.” However, it is Jesus Christ who creates new life in the believer, where before there was only death. Had the Christian culture of Tulsa played any part in this story, Richter might have encountered a Christian friend, who might have helped him to realize, no matter what his parents believed, that salvation can only come through Jesus Christ.

Regrettably, in KEYS TO TULSA , the hero, Richter, finds that the only way he can find meaning is to run away from his problems with a drug-addicted stripper. He seeks meaning on the road, without God.. He could have opened a Bible and opened his heart to John 3:16, which says: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His One and Only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”