Southland Tales, 4 stars
Finally got to see Richard Kelly’s second movie, Southland Tales. His debut, the 2001 Donnie Darko hit me like a ton of bricks, and I had high expectations for this film as well. While Southland Tales is not a perfect movie by any means, it’s vastly better than its initial reception vouches for, and quite an entertaining apocalyptic tale.
The topic of the day is indeed apocalypse, a modern one, in a world not quite like ours. The initial exposition weighs in heavy, but is inevitably necessary to make sense of the plot. I watched the dvd-cut, which is quite a bit shorter than the original film (shown to a principally negative audience at Cannes). The movie bombed at the box office domestically, and was nowhere near a big screen release internationally.
The film consists of three chapters. I initially thought that starting from chapter 4 was a homage to Star Wars, but it turns out that the first three have been produced in graphic novel format. If Southland Tales ever emerges as a reasonbly popular disc, I’m pretty sure that a combined edition will appear.
This is an angry movie - Kelly’s hatred of the current regime seethes into almost every scene, sometimes well-packaged, but often too blatant. This is an odd movie - initially the scenes seem to have very little to do with each other evoking David Lynch at times. This is a busy film - there’s so much going on that a mini-series treatment for television would seem a better vehicle for the complex storyline. This is a derivative film - it liberally steals plot threads, characters and scenes from other movies (and by no means confidently, the Philip K. Dick-inspired “Flow My Tears”-line was quite out of place).
But ultimately, this is a complex, thought-provoking film - unlike a lot of the recent big hits (There Will Be Blood, for example), this is not a linear tale smoothed and polished for easy consumption by the masses. No, Southland Tales is a film during which you have to do your own chewing, the producers will not regurgitate an easy meal for the watchers.
The selection of actors is good. Seann William Scott provides the linking arc, Sarah Michelle Gellar excels as the former porn star trying to fit into much bigger boots, but it’s the surprisingly delicate acting from Dwayne Johnson (for the first time under his own name, as opposed to using his wrestling moniker) that’s the real star here. His take on an amnesiac action movie star is inspiring in its insecurity, plagued by odd twitches and horrible lines of dialogue. I didn’t recognize Justin Timberlake as the scarred narrator at all, and based on the credits missed Janeane Garofalo’s appearance completely. Timberlake provides the oddest scene in the movie (and that’s not an easy task here): almost slurring a lip-sync to Killers’ All the things that I have done, accompanied by a dozen platinium-blonde dancers in fifties clothes.
Don’t let the braying critics settle you in to a pre-fabricated opinion - see Southland Tales and form your own.
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