Southland Tales
Friday, 07 Dec 2007 13:23
Sarah Michelle Gellar and the Rock in Southland Tales
Directed by Richard Kelly, out December 8th, starring Dwayne 'the Rock' Johnson, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake and Mandy Moore.
In a nutshell…
Intense, sharp, dizzying
What's it all about?
Kelly claims that Southland Tales is about "the s**t hitting the fan" as US society spirals into every type of breakdown imaginable. Grainy opening shots on a hand-held camera set the tone, as domestic, flag-waving America is suddenly shattered by a nuclear explosion, heralding the start of the slide.
Timberlake's Iraq veteran Private Abilene picks up the pieces for the audience, narrating forward three years to the futuristic 2008 – now close enough to seem a strange choice – where America is at war with the entire 'Axis of Evil', repressive Republicanism is rife and society divides and falls apart before the new threat. The focus then purposefully digresses into the Los Angeles tales promised by the title, with an actor's disappearance, a porn star's confused agenda and a policeman's involvement in a conspiracy all crossing paths on a backdrop of struggle between Orwellian surveillance and 'neo-Marxist' militancy. Travel through a time rift and a bizarre alternative fuel plot add further dimensions to the struggle and make it more comic book than documentary-style realism.
Who's in it?
Richard Kelly shot to fame when Donnie Darko's haunting apocalyptic feel and razor sharp social commentary belatedly won critics and audiences round – but the man behind the masterpiece failed to resurface until a botched screening of an unfinished Southland Tales at Cannes two years ago. The reworked film again goes straight for the jugular, developing Kelly's obsessions with the end of the world, the fourth dimension – and a comically bizarre contemporary American society which is ready to combust under these strains. The cast history seems to be part of the parody, with Gellar's Buffy role, Timberlake's pop status and the Rock's transition from wrestler to movie star all seemingly symbolic of the world Kelly is portraying. Seann William Scott – most famously Steve Stifler in the American Pie trilogy – comes of age in a straight role.
As an example…
Kelly announces his perverse and misguided world when disorientated policeman Roland Taverner (Scott) asks "Who am I?", only to be told by a manipulative neo-Marxist freedom fighter: "None of your business."
American society's shameless hypocrisy is shouted out by a television debate covering the themes of 'quantum teleportation' and 'teen horniness'.
Likelihood of a trip to the Oscars
A plethora of semi-interlinking plots and cryptic figures leaves Southland Tales vulnerable to claims of being a muddled mish-mash - not Oscar material.
What the others say
The Los Angeles Times describes Southland Tales as a "film of consciously unwieldy ambition and scope," but Variety's less equivocal view of the "pretentious, overreaching and fatally unfocused" film of the Cannes showing could be the consensus on the cinema-ready version.
So is it any good?
Kelly's second feature falls short of Donnie Darko's high achievements. The world it portrays seems more akin to the overambitious mapping out of a disastrous near future in recent films like Children of Men and even V for Vendetta. But while the ideas echo this genre's current of post-Iraq pessimism over truth and civil liberties, the imagery of Southland Tales seems to reach for the perverse climaxes of recent David Lynch enigma Inland Empire.
Sound is intermittently deafening and eerily absent, with one scene leading the Rock through a motionless bookshop, where close-up images of comically shocking, puffy, make-up smothered old ladies' faces do the narrating themselves. But where Lynch keeps the attention by creating a powerfully-sustained emotional mood, Kelly's plot is too digressive and loaded with comic juxtapositions to function as well.
Seann William Scott is a revelation, launching the film through some razor-sharp early dialogue with the Rock in a police patrol car. But his ability to suspend tension seems wasted when the film moves from one comic/cryptic exchange to the next at such speed, and without the common thread of imagery to link it all up.
6/10
Nick Jacobs
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