Beyond the Multiplex

Is the spectacularly ambitious "Southland Tales" the next "Donnie Darko"? Plus: Noah Baumbach on directing Nicole Kidman in the wrenching "Margot at the Wedding" (an interview and podcast).

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Independent Film, Beyond the Multiplex, Salon Conversations

Photo: Samuel Goldwyn

Wallace Shawn and Bai Ling in "Southland Tales."

Nov. 15, 2007 | Was 17 months of work enough to transform Richard Kelly's epic post-9/11 fantasy "Southland Tales" from a misshapen monstrosity into a masterpiece? No. But here's the good news: It didn't have to be. After its disastrous 2006 premiere at Cannes, Kelly took his endlessly awaited follow-up to "Donnie Darko" back to the drawing board and reshaped it extensively. If it arrives in final form as (still) a total mess, it's such a passionate and ambitious mess -- overcrowded with extraordinary images, incomprehensible ideas, literary and pop-cultural references and colliding subplots -- that it transcends its adolescent awkwardness and approaches being magnificent.

Nothing about "Southland Tales" should work. A lot of it flat-out doesn't work. Like Kelly's cult-fave debut, it's a movie about the end of the world. But while "Donnie Darko" focused its apocalyptic fantasy and metaphysical mumbo-jumbo on a classic, and sympathetic, character in transition (an adolescent boy coming of age) played by a tremendously gifted actor (Jake Gyllenhaal), "Southland Tales" violates virtually every convention of how movies are supposed to be made. Its cast reads like a who's-who of minor celebrities from Hollywood B-movies and sketch-comedy TV, used more as furniture than as actors. Much of the plot -- hell, almost all of it -- is narrated in voiceover (by Justin Timberlake, no less). The closest thing it offers to a central character is a schizophrenic action-movie star played by a real, if presumably non-schizophrenic, action-movie star.

It's safe to say that Dwayne Johnson (aka the Rock) gives a performance unlike any we have seen from him before, or are likely to see again. Johnson's collection of Shatner-esque line readings, nervous tics and one-liners that seem drawn from never-completed Michael Bay movies ("The fourth dimension's going to collapse on itself, you stupid bitch!") is brave and often funny, but never suggests a recognizable human being. Then again, "Southland Tales" isn't about human beings, or at least every time it tries to be it virtually falls apart. After all, Johnson's character, the Republican-connected movie icon Boxer Santaros, has been through a rift in the time-space continuum and come back with his memory partly erased, increasingly convinced that he's really Jericho Kane (hero of a screenplay Santaros himself wrote), whose destiny is to save the world from imminent destruction. So, you know, we're not exactly dealing with what TV people call a "relatable" character here.

Not only does "Southland Tales" come with three accompanying graphic novels, the movie is meant to be the final three chapters of a baroque end-of-the-world saga set on the Fourth of July in 2008 -- which was still seven years away when Kelly first conceived of this project. The forthcoming presidential election hangs in the balance; apparently the Democratic ticket is Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman, although we don't see either of them, while the fictional Republican nominees are named Eliot and Frost. (We meet vice-presidential candidate Sen. Bobby Frost, played by Holmes Osborne, and without giving too much of Kelly's bizarre literary in-jokes away, let's hazard a guess that his running mate's first name is Tom.)

So from the first frames of the movie, the viewer is behind the 8-ball, information-wise, and we are barraged with graphics and voice-over in a desperate attempt to get us up to speed. There's been a terrorist nuclear attack in Abilene, Texas! So the draft has been reinstated and the United States is simultaneously at war with Iraq, Iran, Syria and North Korea (at least)! It's World War III, and we need new sources of energy! So here comes a shadowy dude straight out of a late-'60s Bond flick named the Baron von Westphalen (Wallace Shawn) with some perpetual-motion machine that harnesses the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California, producing something called Fluid Karma! But the Baron's invention has slowed the rotation of the Earth infinitesimally, leading to fluctuations in the space-time continuum! And what's his connection to the treacherous terrorists of the "neo-Marxist underground," which is situated, naturally enough, in Venice Beach, Calif.?

Trust me, that's only the most fragmentary version of the back story we're supposed to absorb in the first few minutes. Then there's the question of what all this has to do with Boxer, who's come back from the Nevada desert with his mind in tatters and shacked up with a porn actress called Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), star of the ever-popular "Cockchuggers" series, who hosts a TV chat show populated exclusively with other porn stars and has a chart-topping dance hit called "Teen Horniness Is Not a Crime" (apparently to be released as a real-world single). Um, see, Boxer is married to the daughter (Mandy Moore) of the Republican vice-presidential nominee (Osborne), whose dragon-lady wife (Miranda Richardson) heads the new super-secret intelligence service called USIDent, created by some 'roided-up version of the Patriot Act, which seeks to stop terrorism by monitoring all Americans, all the time. Maybe Krysta is working with the neo-Marxist underground, maybe she's working for the Baron and maybe there's no difference between those things. And maybe she's just a porn star who believes that teen horniness is not a crime.

This is all without mentioning Seann William Scott playing both an Iraq-vet-turned-cop and his resistance-fighter twin brother, at least one of whom may have been the subject of a sinister experiment. (Arguably, his character, or characters, should be the film's center.) Or Timberlake as a scarred loner with the suggestive name of Pilot Abilene, also a veteran and a drug addict, who narrates the film and appears in a musical number (lip-syncing "All the Things That I Have Done" by the Killers) that has nothing to do with anything but provides the most exciting and dramatic moment in the whole movie. Something evidently happened between those two guys in Iraq -- but we never find out what. I'm sure Kelly's fans will immerse themselves in these details (and many, many more), and I don't dispute that if Kelly came to my house and explained the whole thing to me over a couple of hours and a couple of six-packs, it might more or less hang together.

Beyond the Multiplex Video: Is this the next great cult film?

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