There’s something rather fascinating about a director crashing and burning. One views it with mixed emotions, both pity and glee. There’s gratitude that it’s not you; there is a bit of schadenfreude at the pillorying of another pretentious Hollywood egoist. The most recent, prominent director to flirt with disaster is Richard Kelly. He is known for one film, the cult movie Donnie Darko which viewers appear to either love or loathe. Such visceral responses could be put to good use by a polemical director like Oliver Stone, but when Kelly finally came to make his sophomore film, his cult status appears to have given him license to pursue the worse aspects of the earlier film at the expense of what made it at least reasonably accessible to viewers.

Southland Tales is an epical fantasia set in the near future, 2008, during a national election which is taking place in the midst of an international nuclear war. The film follows various factions — candidates, rebels, movie stars, scientists — with hidden agendum, with the primary focus a search for the movie star Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson, aka, The Rock), a Bruce Willis style action film star who, by virtue of his marriage to a presidential candidate’s daughter, is an asset on the campaign trailer, but who, in his amnesiac state, offers something to a radical underground group. The roughly 140-minute film is easy to follow through its first 90 minutes, as long as you don’t stop to try and explain it to anyone, but a series of reversals and betrayals in its last hour start to leave the viewer behind.

As a storyteller, Kelly is attracted to apocalyptic tales threatening the comfortable upper middle class existence from which he emerged, and he prefers ambiguity over clarity. As shown by Southland Tales, he has a rather crude and obvious sense of humor. Word of this film was leaking out even before it hit the festival circuit, and apparently Kelly tinkered with its American release edition. It is still over-long and overdone. Not only are there three “graphic novels” (i.e., comic books) that give the film’s back story, but there is an impenetrable website (http://www.southlandtales.com/) that is just as complicated and opaque as the movie. But now that this train wreck is here, the disaster that is Southland Tales raises some interesting issues.

The End of the Auteur Theory When this policy guiding the editorial vision of the magazine Cahiers du cinema was first enunciated back in the 1950s it posited simply that the most interesting thing about a film was its director’s personality and vision. But now, 50 years later, directors may well be out of control. Not every director has something to say or a personal style. In fact, these days, signatures from film to film may well be found most often from the producing end of of a film. It is difficult to imagine this quirky film being quite this bad had a Jerry Bruckheimer or a Scott Rudin produced it. We may be living in time when a Producer’s Theory is more operative as an approach to understanding cinema. If the directors want to reclaim their post at the pinnacle of the creative pyramid, they’d better start reigning in their excesses and finding ways to reconnect with audiences.

Novelty Casting Oddball casting is a signature of so-called independent cinema and it’s taken to a bizarre extreme here. Among the cast members besides the Rock are Seann William Scot, who appeared with The Rock in The Rundown, Buffy star Sarah Michelle Gellar, pop singer Mandy Moore, British actress Miranda Richardson, American cult favorite Kevin Smith, TV sitcom star John Larroquette, Christopher Lambert, Wallace Shawn, Bai Ling, and Justin Timberlake. I even thought I saw Bob Barker in a crowd scene. My only response is I’m tired of it, because too often the novel actor is not suitable for the part, a problem throughout Southland Tales, from Shawn as a mad scientist to Gellar as a porn queen.

Homage Frenzy Related to this is unyielding inclination of a certain kind of filmmaker to homages. Again, this is rooted in the French new wave crew, which liked to cite their favorite movies and inspirations. Modern indie style filmmakers are out of control magpies, however, and rarely do the citations point to meaning, the way Scorsese did with his quotes from Godard in Taxi Driver. Usually they are just shout offs to insiderish favorites. At least if one is bored, one can catalog identifiable references. Kelly cites from the films that influenced his youth, films by Lucas and Spielberg. Like the revised Star Wars, this film opens as Episode IV; novelty casting includes Rebekah Del Rio, from David Lynch movies, and Zelda Rubinstein, who was in Spielberg’s Poltergeist. I leave it to others to mount a website collating all of Kelly’s references.

Bad Influences It’s not enough to be influenced by previous generations of artists. They have to be good artists. So for Kelly to seemingly evoke Altman’s Brewster McCloud is not heartening. Other films that Southland Tales brings to mind, unintentionally or not, include Privilege, Myra Breckenridge, Lost Highway, and Fellini’s Intervista, more, though, for their good-directors-gone-bad excesses. Another influence appears to be The Magic Christian, which also concludes in a vast flying machine (here it is a dirigible). The film that Kelly seems to have taken most to heart is Gus Van Sant’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. For example, Wallace Shawn villain/hero is derived, even down to his plastered coif, from John Hurt’s performance as The Countess in that nightmare of a film.

The SNL Curse If we can agree for a moment that the worst influence on the culture during the last 30 years is Saturday Night Live, than Southland Tales is the ne plus ultra of that influence. The SNL alums are responsible for more bad films that any one single entity, be it a major studio or a deranged producer. Southland Tales has no less than five SNL alumni in its cast, including Cheri Oteri as Zora Carmichaels, Jon Lovitz as crazy cop Bart Bookman, the dreadful Nora Dunn as the foul mouthed Cyndi Pinziki, Amy Poehler as Dream, and even Janeane Garofalo, passing though in a part that must have been severely edited down. Dunn is especially horrible, and Kelly is at a loss to control or guide her. The laziness and the sloppiness of the acting in her scenes with her various colleagues is an outrage and an insult. If Kelly wanted to hex his film into oblivion, he could have done nothing better than to pack his cast with the execrable refuse from SNL.

The Sin of Pretentiousness Finally, Southland Tales suffers worst from the sin of pretentiousness. This happens most usually when a vacuous director yearningly wishes to make a statement but has nothing to say. From its kitsch poetry quotations to its terrible jokes (which, as a colleague pointed out, are followed by a hold for laughs that will never, ever come), Southland Tales is the product of a man in love with his own inarticulate vision, with no person in his entourage, and no inherent artistic talent, there to put the brakes on his pretentiousness.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 3rd, 2007 at 7:12 pm and is filed under Reel Politique - Film columnist DK Holm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.