Southland Tales (2007)
Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales is largely every bit as tedious as you’ve probably heard. The film is so self-absorbed, so convoluted, so indulgent, so insecure yet self-congratulatory in the same measure, so stubbornly unwavering in its determination to name check seemingly every writer that Kelly has ever read, that you just want to wash your hands of the damn thing. The dialogue is arch and self-aware; the intentional and unintentional awfulness impossible to discern. Yet, fleeting passages of Southland Tales have a haunting power, and there’s an originality to Kelly’s ambition. Kelly has crafted a bloated future shock thriller where everyone essentially battles for control of the internet as the world crumbles around them.
There’s a certain skewed brilliance to the notion, and the film’s infuriating delivery of that notion is occasionally on the money. The vague story of Southland Tales has been shattered and filtered through a seemingly endless current of distraction: internet, music videos, talk shows, drugs, sci-fi, bad cop shows, etc. Seemingly every actor that appears in the film is a wrestler, or TV show or Saturday Night Live veteran (I think at this point SNL and regular TV can safely count as separate institutions) and that’s not accidental, everything about life has been reduced to the trivial, the convoluted, and the overwrought in Southland Tales; society is suffocating under the weight of the countless meaningless methods of supposedly delivering truth, meaning or stimulation. At its best Southland Tales captures the fuck it despair of the new generation, and for that alone, shouldn’t be ignored. The film may be, in its own surly, contrary way, an Iraq film we could actually use.
Admittedly, it would be a teenager’s Iraq protest film, a self-involved, self-glorifying rebel yell that really serves no purpose other than to make a little noise. But what noise Kelly makes when his ideas sporadically take hold! I love the Miranda Richardson character, the wife (I think, whenever I describe plot in this post, always insert the qualifier, I think) of a political wannabe who seems to be capable of watching the majority of the movie from a fortified media room somewhere in Los Angeles, though it’s a sign of Kelly’s misplaced confidence that she doesn’t occasionally change the channel. I love the little nuggets of broad, manic cynicism that occupy the fringes of the film; such as the Hustler sponsorship of the military or an advertisement that boasts, to my knowledge, the first doggy style coupling between two oversized SUVs to be featured in all of American film.
I also admire the brazen pointlessness of the film’s narrative. At least two principle characters have amnesia, and both of them (remember, I think) have doubles who somehow crossed the space time continuum to blah, blah, blah, a similar conceit was actually handled with more finesse in the seventy minute Futurama movie but we’ll forgive it that. I love the Rock and Sarah Michelle Gellar’s screenplay (which, far as I can tell, is the screenplay to Southland Tales itself, retitled The Power) and the way the Rock goes about trying to describe his convoluted scenario that he’s clearly rehearsed, right down to how many decimal points go into a figure that really has nothing to do with the story. Sarah Michelle Gellar even repeats that figure under her breath along with him, possibly aroused at the thought of co-writing a sci-fi action film with the Rock.
But, as women have a habit of doing in paranoid men’s sci-fi fantasies; Gellar’s actually trying to set up the poor Rock, who’s essentially playing himself. The Rock is married to a relative of an important politician that several groups hope to discredit, all so they can resume control USIDENT, which basically controls the internet. That one needs a visa to drive across a state line seems to be of concern to no one. That gas has basically run out, replaced by something that punches holes in that space-time thingy, also seems to be the cause of little worry. News of the currently raging third World War is little more than filler for the Spike Channel. Perhaps everyone is too busy watching Gellar’s TV show, which addresses such pressing issues of the moment as crime, poverty and teen horniness.
It’s as blunt and alienating as it sounds, Kelly has footage of Kiss Me Deadly playing in the back of a scene, but it’s really Repo Man, another sci-fi descendent of that classic noir, that he should be name checking. Then again, Southland Tales really has all of the name checking that it, or I, can stand. Kelly, perhaps realizing to a certain extent how people were going to take this, has loaded the film with an impenetrable, indefensible tangent of double speak that appears to be almost entirely lifted from the prose of past writers he admires, especially Philip K. Dick, all serving no other apparent purpose than to prove that Kelly, whether you hate the movie or not, is at least well read.
Southland Tales is probably the disaster that the director of Donnie Darko needed to make. I was around Darko’s target age when that film was released, and was initially quite taken with Kelly’s mix of Twilight Zone and self-pity; but time and getting older have not been kind to that debut picture. I don’t dislike Donnie Darko, but it’s a clunky, unconvincing movie that I never really feel the need to revisit. Southland Tales is even more distractingly full of itself, but perhaps it’s the embarrassment that Kelly needed to ground his promising talent. Southland Tales, ultimately, is more of a wannabe statement than an actual statement, but it has a bit of the crazed fervor that powers the great movies as well as the follies, and it’s for that that I can’t quite bring myself to hate it. The movies need more missteps like it, if for no other reason than I can only devote so many words to Big Momma’s House.
★★
