Alienating Cinema and The Cinema of Alienation

Sometimes a movie simply has too many ideas. Sometimes there is simply too much going in a two to three hour movie that it ends up choking on itself. And then it begins gagging. And barfing. And then you simply can’t tell at all what it is anymore. It doesn’t even matter if they’re too many good ideas or two many bad ones. Southland Tales for instance, has way too many really good ideas and its suffocating on all of them.Southland Tales is the new movie by the apparent visionary Richard Kelly who also delivered the equally bizarre and puzzling Donnie Darko. Donnie Darko was a underground hit that dealt with a troubled teen who sees visions of guys in bunny suits and learn to harness time and space to save the world (can’t Hollywood think of anything original anymore?). It was clever, well constructed, a good cast gave good performances, and it was baffling enough to ensure repeat viewing to figure out the labyrinth of mysteries through the whole film.

Southland seems to be emulating the same basic structure, “basic” being used loosely, in that there’s a story being told that becomes more and more epic as the film progresses. It seems to be about a dystopian future, World War III has reduced at least the Southwestern portion of the US into wastelands of shattered cities and morals. There’s a movie star who also is an amnesiac who’s trying to produce a screenplay which just might be a real forecast of the end of the world. There’s a former pornstar who has her own talk show with other pornstars who talk politics. There’s an army sergeant who is kidnapped and replaced by his evil twin. There’s a bizarro scientist who develops a life-changing source of energy called “liquid karma” who then becomes a power-mad savant who wears too much makeup. There are factions of revolutionaries who are out seemingly to bring down the establishment by showing incriminating footage of the movie star who’s also the son-in-law of a powerful Senator. Also there’s some kind of time/space rift in the Arizona desert that some of the characters may or may not have gone into. So basically, I have no maddening clue as to what its all about. Except maybe a parable mirroring Revelations, seeing as how the some characters keep going back to passages from it and, oddly, Robert Frost poems as well.

See what I mean? Lots of stuff going on. All divided into George Lucas-esque chapters, beginning with chapter 4 and ending with 6. Apparently then first three chapters were designed as graphic novels and released before the movie to pique interest.

The strangest element of the film may be the casting. Richard Kelly in his first outing with Donnie Darko managed to rope in actors like the siblings Gyllenhaal Jake and Maggie, Mary MacDonell, Patrick Swayze, Drew Barrymore, Noah Wyle, Jena Malone and even Katherine Ross into key roles. Pretty good for an indie movie with a weird script. Southland has at least four times as many characters and they’re all played by the likes of Dwayne Johnson aka The Rock, Mandy Moore (in a truly thankless role), Sarah Michelle-Gellar, Seann William-Scott, Wallace Shawn of all people as the mad scientist, Justin Timberlake, and other small roles being handed out to Cheri Oteri, Amy Poehler, John Larroquette (!), Kevin Smith, Nora Dunn, Curtis Armstrong, Jon Lovitz, Bai Ling, Christopher Lambert, Miranda Richardson, and Janeane Garafalo. The weirdness doesn’t stop.

And it sure doesn’t stop there. With the weird cast one might expect the weird acting that follows suit, but it seems to have a particular style of acting that seems intentional. Like David Mamet’s The Spanish Prisoner, there is a brand of acting that’s wooden but oddly intentionally wooden at that. One gets the feeling that Kelly instructed all of his actors to go over the top and hope for the best. It works in a way I suppose, everything is so strange and chaotic the viewer hardly has time to wonder why a cast like this aren’t delivering more sensitive performances.

Sometimes this structure works; for all those who loved Starship Troopers like I did you weren’t fazed by the pretty-boy cast and corny script, the movie was funny and well told through those devices. Southland Tales is exploding out of its frame and numbing brains in the process. There’s no doubt some visionary material on screen, there’s just too damn much of it. Maybe the director’s cut will make more sense.

On the distant other side of the genre of alienated people and alienating societies, Netflix coincidentally delivered me Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura just after Southland. L’Avventura is a film about a group of Italians who go out on a cruise to an island where one girl mysteriously disappears. The movie is spent looking for her, but its hardly a mystery movie or any kind of a thriller. Its instead a failed romance movie and an examination of how poorly people can be equipped and communicating with one another.

In terms of presentation it is the polar opposite of Southland. Where Southland was ambitious, loud, expensive looking, filled with futuristic special effects and sets, and crammed full of mellowing Moby music, L’Avventura is quiet, brooding, oblique, and sparse in photography and locations. Very mellow, in fact this is my second attempt to watch it and the second time I’ve fallen asleep during it. I blame trying to watch it late at night when I’m already tired, but Antonioni has a notorious knack for putting his audience to sleep. He, like Richard Kelly, also shucks conventional plot and story structure for something much more internal. Something you have to think about for a while if you’re ever going to understand what you just saw.

Both films are likely to attract just as many fans as detractors, and L’Avventura has been doing just that since its 1960 release. Many people decried it as being too meandering and boring while not ever being about the very thing it sets its premise up to be. L’Avventura, not unlike Donnie Darko, has built up a mammoth following since its release and many now consider it to be a pure masterpiece. Something that was ahead of its time. Perhaps time will show that Southland Tales was miles ahead of the competition and broke ground while others were planting seedlings.

By the time I finished L’Avventura I found myself in t a similar state after watching Darko. I found myself thinking about everything I just watched and how it all did or didn’t fit together. There was much that touched me and that I found achingly beautiful. There were other elements that just scribbled a big “?” over my head like a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. Other elements made me wonder why I should care. I felt these same reactions after Southland, but days afterwards I still avoided thinking about it because the headache it gave me tended to return once I did. Donnie Darko prompted me to watch it again within hours and after I wrangled a few more of my friends to come over and watch it with me.

One of these days L’Avventura will be playing at a local rep theater and I will rush over to see it on the big screen and come out overwhelmed by its beauty. One day I’ll be at a friend’s house while Donnie Darko is playing and we’ll all talk about it and fawn over it like we did when we first saw it. One of these days I’ll catch the second half of Southland Tales on late-night IFC and after a few beers it will suddenly click and make some miraculous kind of sense. I’ll have to write more about it then.