Not normally a “quote Wikipedia” kind of guy, but I feel the following excerpt from the entry on Kalifornia will help explain my utter befuddlement:

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times lauded the film, awarding it a full four stars and describing it as "unflinchingly honest, and so well acted that for most of the film I abandoned any detachment and just watched it as if I were observing the lives of real people.” Ebert went on to note that Pitt and Lewis give "two of the most harrowing and convincing performances I've ever seen." Leonard Klady of Variety also praised the performances of the lead cast and likened the film to Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955), deeming it "an extremely handsome production imbued with a chilling, surrealistic sensibility.”

That’s…baffling, to say the least.

I mean, c’mon. Saying Brad Pitt and Juliette Lewis gave “two of the most harrowing and convincing performances” ever is like awarding a Michelin star to the Hardee’s in Metter, Georgia. Lewis is okay, I guess—her role as the childlike moron Adele comes off as a trial run of her Mallory Knox accent—but good lord is Pitt swinging for the fences with a whiffle ball bat with his sticky, whiny, we’re-gonna-git-them-Duke-boys southern drawl, swaying from slow Mississippi mud to Walter Brennan-style old cootery often in the same sentence, occasionally within the same word. Creates a bit of a disconnect when compared to David Duchovny, whose wooden monotone reaches epic non-proportions here, his character’s sole defining trait being the minuscule hoop earrings he wears.

Look, diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks and all, but geez.