A few weeks ago, Neil sent me a message saying that he’d decided to go see Southland Tales before it left theatres. When I asked the natural response to this, "why?", we had a reasonably long discussion about the film, the pros and cons of post-Donnie Darko Richard Kelly, and about how he could just wait and watch it on dvd. His main point was this "Either I’ll totally hate the movie or I’ll be crazy for it" (that’s a rough approximation as I no longer have the message but you get the idea).
Neil ended up not seeing Southland Tales; instead, he watched In Bruges*.
Tonight, after leaving work early (due mostly to not being able to focus on anything and asking customers the same question repeatedly), I decided to scratch my morbid itch and watch this hotly contested film. Southland Tales was booed at
Darko Heads immediately declared it a work of genius that haters were simply "not getting"; everyone else seemed to have pretty serious problems with the movie.
Which camp did I fall in?
As though it would surprise anyone that I’m in the latter camp, except that this movie doesn’t just have serious problems; it is a serious problem. Nothing works in Southland Tales as a movie. Most reviews simply try to ignore the plot, which is the easy way for fanatics to say they "didn’t get it", but I can give you a pretty good synopsis based on the various movies Southland Tales is trying to be:
Imagine if any of the asshole "philosopher" characters in Waking Life were asked to remake Doctor Strangelove, Strange Days, and Donnie Darko and roll them all together into a commentary on the state of affairs in America, let’s say two years ago (when the film was actually made, as opposed to released).
So you can expect cheap shots directed at the Patriot Act, George Bush, Big Oil, and a particularly shitty joke concerning Karl Rove and banking. You can also expect exagerrated Orwellian overtones and "Big Brother" references plus tons of jabs at reality television, celebrity culture, and politicians.
On top of that, take a handful of different plots and counterplots to overthrow said Big Government by "Neo-Marxists" who alternate between blackmail and staged assassinations in order to "Stick it to the man" or, in one instance, to taser John Larroquette in the balls (true story).
Since we haven’t covered all of the bases here, let’s give everyone a ridiculous name and we still haven’t gotten to the part about the rift in the Fourth Dimension that causes time travel and duplicates of characters in order to give some kind of "weirdness" factor in order to wrap things up.
Finish things off with Justin Timberlake constantly narrating, telling us things we a) didn’t need to know, or b) aren’t necessary to the story, plus frequently quoting the book of revelations. Other characters quote "The Hollow Men" and "The Road Not Taken" over and over again, well beyond the point they would be significant.
Except that none of these elements work together. At least, not in this movie. What’s so strange about Southland Tales is that so much of it will seem familiar to you because all of these ideas have been used to better effect before (obviously, since I can name three clear origin points for Southland Tales, all of which are better movies) and that as hard as Kelly tries, he just can’t make Tales cohere into anything but a jumble of half baked ideas and literary references.
I sometimes fear that Lost is going to end up this way; like Tales, Lost relies of frequent referencing of philosophers, authors, and scientists in the narrative of the show, usually surfacing in the book a character is reading or in the name of someone introduced (eg Locke, Rousseau, C.S. Lewis, Minkowski, Hume, etc). Southland Tales has no shortage of ideas it’s drawing from, but nothing coherent ever emerges, which sadly could also be what Lost ends up doing.
It amazes me that so many comedians are in this film, particularly because none of them seem to know what tone to play for: Amy Poehler is obviously shooting for comedy, but Nora Dunn and Cheri Oteri don’t seem to know what they’re doing. Jon Lovitz acts like he’s been cast as the villain of a Bad Boys movie, and Wallace Shawn is just doing his schtick, which is funny, because Curtis "Booger" Armstrong and Mad TV’s Will Sasso play it straight as an arrow. Kevin Smith, despite wearing makeup that kind of sort of makes him look like Orson Welles in F for Fake, sounds exactly like he always does.
Even Dwayne Johnson is totally lost in this movie, alternating between super cool "Rock" mode and nervously twitching his fingers funny guy, which doesn’t make any kind of sense when he says things like "I’m a pimp. Pimps don’t commit suicide" (by the way, his character is not that of a pimp).
Please feel free to jump on me for not having read the graphic novels, which apparently is the only way to "appreciate" the movie, since the film is parts 4-6 of a story, but I sincerely doubt that it would be useful in getting through the first thirty minutes of the film, which are so godawful and exposition heavy that I nearly turned it off. After that, I sat in semi-amazement, thinking "gee, this works so much better in other movies than in Southland Tales."
Maybe the longer cut helps (it might at least explain the Janeane Garafalo shots near the end), but I sense that three hours of Southland Tales would only be more flailing around in the dark, trying to make this mess congeal. Richard Kelly might want to learn how to tell a story before he tries to make his own Doctor Strangelove**, because you have to understand structure before you make fun of it. before it left theatres. When I asked the natural response to this, "why?", we had a reasonably long discussion about the film, the pros and cons of post-
* Future Cap'n gives Neil props for choosing wisely. If you haven't seen In Bruges by now, do it post haste.
** oh, did i not mention this is supposed to be a comedy?
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