Dir. Richard Kelly, Ger/US/Fr, 2006, 144 mins
Cast: Dwanye Johnson, Mandy Moore, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Sean William Scott
Review by Matthew Rodgers
Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly’s sophomore effort was released in its bloated 3 hour form at Cannes 2006 and met with a reception that can be politely called hostile – “Southland Tales was so bad it made me wonder if [Kelly] had ever met a human being”, Jason Solomons from The Observer, and esteemed US critic Roger Ebert noted that the screening was “The most disastrous since, yes, Brown Bunny” – but now over a year and a half later and running 19 mins shorter, complete with new Justin Timberlake voice-over (“I instructed him to watch Apocalypse Now”) and Janeane Garofalo sub-plot on the editing suite floor in a puddle of Kelly’s sweat, his vision is released for all to judge. To quote T.S. Elliot, and Southland’s bodged poeticisms, this story ends “Not with a bang but a whimper”.
To attempt to summarise the plot of Kelly’s labyrinthine script would be an undertaking as ridiculously ambitious as the film itself. Let's just start by saying that it’s narrated by the aforementioned sexyback singer as an “I-rack” veteran and it features an action star with amnesia named Boxer Santaros (Dwanye Johnson – Gridiron Gang), his porn star partner Krysta Now (Buffy herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar), his unknowing wife (Mandy Moore), “could be, might be” twins Roland and Ronald Taverner (Sean William Scott) and host of other headache inducing characters that are involved in the last three days before the impending apocalypse. That’s about as far as it can be stripped down.
The strange thing about Southland Tales is that it’s not as bad as the preceding history would suggest, somewhere in amongst the hallucinogenic sub-plots over sub-plots there is a fantastic movie trying to escape. In fact, it is the gestation period since initial viewing that has allowed some of the more creative aspects to impress – the striking opening sequence and the Blade-runner type vistas for the finale (a vibe that Kelly had unrealistically indicated he was aiming for) are as striking as anything on-screen this year. You can add to that the superb score by Moby, which lazily seems to be used to replace any emoting but is epically suitable for the film's lofty aspirations.
It is testament to Kelly that he has fought to have his visualisation, albeit in a tampered form, released because there is no doubt he is an incredible talent – note the superb tracking shot as we follow the camera through the mega-zeppelin, skirting through its now familiar passengers and onto the dance floor, it's reminiscent of De Palma in his pomp.
It is the failure to connect that jars the most, characters speak in a stagey pronounced fashion, and that cold alienation only adds to the theme of a world without identity – the national anthem has morphed into a part-Spanish rock anthem – but it doesn’t help in allowing the audience to immerse themselves in the world that Kelly has created. Surely in a film about the end of the world you want to care if the characters live or not??
Of the characters it is The Artists Formerly Known as The Rock and Stifler that impress the most, not amazing performances but enough to convince that somewhere, in a 4th dimension in Kelly’s mad-cap brain exists a version which would do them justice.
And therein lies the major problem with Southland Tales: there are just too many ideas competing with one-another that it results in a Munchausen mess of a movie. Is it a commentary on American politics and the war in Iraq? Most certainly, with the constant re-iterating of the forced draft and the “Hustler” advertising on the side of the tanks, it is an attack on a media war in a consumerist culture. Is it a time travelling epic? Is it a love story? Is it a Christ revisionist piece? Is it all a dream? Or is it simply the sort of movie in which our protagonist is told “The soul of a monkey can not travel through the dimensional threshold”? Make of it what you will, that appears to be the beauty of it.
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