Posted: 11/17/2007

Southland Tales

(2007)

by Matt Wedge

Ever since its infamous poorly reviewed premiere at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, writer-director Richard Kelly’s apocalyptic Southland Tales has been one of the most talked about films that nobody has ever seen. Everyone seems to have an opinion about the film, but I’ve always wondered how many of these people have actually seen the movie and how many are just regurgitating someone else’s thoughts. Having just viewed the theatrical cut (apparently shorter than the Cannes version by about 25 minutes), I’m here to tell you that the film is definitely not the misunderstood masterpiece that some people have deluded themselves into imagining. But on the plus side, it’s not the completely unwatchable mess that was reported from Cannes. It’s an occasionally watchable mess.

The plot (such as it is) takes place in the very near future and revolves around movie star Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson, Be Cool). He has been missing for over a week, having disappeared in the Nevada desert. When he reappears in L.A., with his memory erased and shacking up with porn star/pop singer/talk show host/energy drink manufacturer Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar, The Grudge), people seeking to use him for their own ends start shooting each other and asking questions, in that order. From there, the film devolves into a mess of political satire, neo-Marxist dissidents, Biblical metaphors, sci-fi plot twists, cheap sex jokes and several creepy scenes with Sean William Scott (American Pie) as a depressed police officer with some secrets of his own about Boxer’s missing time.

If this all sounds confusing, that’s because it is. What’s even worse, it seems that Kelly has designed it with that purpose in mind. He breaks the film up into three chapters: four, five and six, as though the audience has missed out on some important information in the first three, nonexistent chapters. While this concept of withholding information and keeping the audience in the dark worked well in his previous film, Donnie Darko, he misses the mark this time around. The whole thing reeks of pretension and a director who tried to bite off way more than he could possibly chew.

That’s not to say there aren’t interesting ideas to be had in this bizarre world. Kelly makes some points about how easily public perception of the Republican party might be tipped back to favorable if there was another attack on American soil. There is a sick sense of humor running through the satire portion of the film, complete with animated SUVs literally humping smaller vehicles, a leftist revolutionary group who can’t stop fighting with/shooting each other to focus on the increasingly fascist practices of the government and the incredibly shallow reality trash the government keeps pumping across television screens to keep the masses from rebelling.

But ideas are all that Kelly has. He never follows them all the way through to any conclusion, usually getting distracted by a different thought and following that until he’s distracted, yet again. By the time the scattershot narrative takes a break for a musical interlude of Justin Timberlake (Black Snake Moan) lip-syncing to a song by The Killers while a chorus line of girls dance around him in an arcade, I was ready to throw my arms up in frustration.

It’s never a good thing to fault a young filmmaker for trying something different, but in this case it might have been a good idea for Kelly to tackle something smaller in scope. He might have been better able to craft a coherent tale that effectively skewered the public’s lack of concern about the way the current U.S. government views its citizens and the rest of the world. With Southland Tales, he occasionally gives voice to that frustration and anger, but more often than not, he sabotages himself with too many indecipherable elements and bizarre cameos (Cheri Oteri and Christopher Lambert in the same scene? That might actually be a sign of the Apocalypse). There is no denying the power and inventiveness of Donnie Darko, so I believe that he still has the chance to deliver a great film, but this time he took a big swing and came up empty.

Matt Wedge is a writer and film critic living in Chicago.

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