Southland Tales (2006)
Remember 2006? Remember Stifler from American Pie? Remember the moment when you first became aware of Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson? Remember Buffy? Remember George Bush? Remember the Iraq war? Remember Donnie Darko? Remember The Killers? Remember Karl Rove? Remember the Patriot Act? Remember Paris Hilton? Remember the Florida recount? Remember when Justin Timberlake released Sexyback?
If you don’t, allow me to introduce you to Southland Tales. Writer/director Richard Kelly’s catastrophic satirical sci-fi epic is one gigantic 2006 time capsule. It takes the faces, references, pop culture and politics of 2006, rolls it all up into a big jagged ball and throws it full pelt at your face. Critic Will Sloan put it best, describing Southland Tales as “a big box of loaded and evocative sounds and images, from which you are invited to assemble your own meaning”.
Richard Kelly was on a high after the 2001 release of his mega cult hit Donnie Darko. Though it made little traction at the box office, Darko soon found its audience through the DVD market. It was a film designed for home video, and it spread across the world like a virus, generating over 10 million dollars in DVD sales in the US alone. This made Kelly a certified indie auteur, giving him the freedom to work with big stars on a big budget.
Like Paul Thomas Anderson and Orson Welles before him, Kelly used his new reputation to craft a grand vision of America. The result was Southland Tales, a film that aims to provide the definitive statement on the here and now. The problem is that it has absolutely no idea what it wants to say, other than: ‘wow, this is messed up’. It takes all of the matter of 2006, every punchline and every common reference, and frantically launches them at the screen over and over again. It has nothing to say about any celebrity or politician: it simply references their existence.
The film begins with a vicious barrage of information. Two nuclear explosions in Texas have given George Bush the authority to ramp up his war on terror, allowing the Republican Party to reintroduce the draft and launch a Third World War against the axis of evil: Syria, Iraq, Iran and North Korea. While thousands die overseas, this alternative USA introduces an invasive surveillance program called US-IDENT, monitoring the actions of every citizen at almost every second of the day. A new police state is formed and the United States splinters into a collection of 50 militarised states that enforce rigorous border checks.
In Los Angeles, a movie star named Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson) wanders around in a daze. He’s been suffering from amnesia ever since he was discovered unconscious and alone in the Nevada desert. A former porn star named Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar) has shacked up with Boxer and is eagerly promoting her new talk show, which aims to destigmatise ‘teen horniness’ with pop songs and frank discussion. Elsewhere, a team of Neo-Marxists have kidnapped a police offer (Sean William Scott) and are using his twin brother (Sean William Scott) to impersonate him. Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake) is a wounded WW3 veteran who injects himself with experimental fuel and hallucinates extravagant musical numbers. He’s the film’s narrator, but he won’t clear much up.
Kelly’s film flirts with a kind of disorientating hyperlink style, connecting a diverse cast of characters across Los Angeles through their different allegiances and schemes. Boxer is married to the daughter of the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, making his dalliance with a former porn star a brewing scandal. While working on an original script, Boxer goes on a ride-along with the Neo-Marxist posing a policeman, bringing him into contact with the underground resistance. The Vice President, Bobby Frost (Holmes Osborne) is married to the US-IDENT chief, Nana Mae Frost (Miranda Richardson). Both are frantically searching for Boxer Santaros.
I couldn’t tell you what happens after this set-up. Fragments dance behind my eyes: monkeys are sent through a space-time portal, a giant blimp hosts a cocktail party for the high and mighty, a draft dodger on a floating ice cream truck fires a stinger missile and Jon Lovitz murders innocent civilians. This could be the material of good silly pulp fiction, but each WTF moment is too brief, mind-bending and elliptical to make an impression. The film passes in an ugly, smeared blur of metallic silver, restlessly jumping from one absurd episode to another without explaining the connections between them.
Kelly’s direction is significantly weaker than it was in his first film. Donnie Darko immediately establishes a strong sense of atmosphere, using gentle but bold camerawork to explore a small town and expose its secrets. I often remember the gorgeous tracking shot through the school hallways (set to the Tears for Fears song Head Over Heels), or the wistful slow-motion introduction to Donnie’s neighbourhood. Kelly’s camera is restless but never too intrusive, gliding along like a summer breeze and observing every face and gesture with sympathy.
80% of the shots in Southland Tales are flat and unimaginative mediums or medium-close-ups, each isolating one character from another. Little to no care is put into the composition, form or tone of the film’s imagery, which renders grand environments static and limp. This blocks the film from developing any sense of atmosphere or location, making every space uniform, sterile and blank. Southland Tales looks like a shiny TV movie starring a bunch of people who aren’t sharing a room, giving it the same corporate sluggishness that weighs down the later Marvel films. It looks more than a little cheap and slapdash, despite the obvious time and money put into it.
There are no three-dimensional characters and the story refuses to make sense, but minute-by-minute there is some strange magic to Kelly’s film. It’s surprisingly watchable and engaging, despite its utter lack of dramatic or political substance, moving along at a good pace and armouring itself with a surprise array of character actors. Wallace Shawn and John Laroquette are both welcome faces in the chaos, as is Curtis Armstrong. Every character is a a paper-thin punchline from a dated SNL sketch, but on a scene-by-scene basis they do possess the power to make me chuckle.
Sarah Michelle Gellar is the obvious stand-out, playing her rehabilitated porn star character in the style of a jaded reality show diva. She’s got panache and strong comic timing, cracking a few good one-liners as the walls of reality collapse around her. There’s something oddly compelling about The Rock too. He wears a look of perpetual mild confusion, twiddling his fingers and stumbling through LA like an oversized child trying to find a toilet. His repeated catchphrase “pimps don’t commit suicide” is so baffling and unwarranted that it becomes quite funny. Based mostly on the offbeat charm of this strange comedy, I wouldn’t be too surprised if I end up an unironic defender of Kelly’s film in a few years’ time. I can already feel it happening.
In recent years, the name Southland Tales has become a signifier for other grand zeitgeist movie failures (particularly Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis), which is telling. Kelly’s film is medically guaranteed to give you a headache. It’s stupidly overstuffed, unnecessarily lengthy and so undercooked that you may get food poisoning just by watching it. The film’s fatal flaw is its complete and total lack of opinion. Kelly shows an exaggerated vision of George Bush’s American police state, but doesn’t go any further than that. The obvious implication is that Kelly is against Bush, but all of the police state’s opponents are purposefully shown to be dumb and incompetent. The film drifts through cynical references, shouting out what it sees without taking the time to form a viewpoint.
V for Vendetta is another reaction to the war on terror and the right-wing politics of the mid-2000s. Like Southland Tales, it creates an exaggerated version of the here and now, placing it in the near future. V for Vendetta works because it’s focused on two central characters, it doesn’t force bucket loads of exposition on its audience, it’s attractively filmed and it has clear politics. It’s a sharp and principled film that uses gorgeous action sequences and eye-popping explosions with intelligence, connecting them to detailed characters and their principled struggle against fascism. In comparison, Kelly’s film is unwieldy and unfocused, confused and recklessly ambitious. It feels unfinished.
Southland Tales creates a big ugly collage of 2006, mashing everything and everyone together in the hopes that the result will be striking enough to grab someone’s attention somewhere. It has anthropological merit and some entertainment value (I would imagine that watching it inebriated with a group of receptive friends is very fun) but its appeal is strictly limited. Watching this film is like using your bare hands to hold a cake that's only been in the oven for two minutes. It quickly reduces into sloppy batter and runs on to the floor, staining the tiles. Licking your fingers afterwards is fun, though it may give you salmonella.
P.S. The above review refers to the theatrical cut of Southland Tales, which is the most widely available version of the film. I have since been able to track down a copy of the original cut, shown at Cannes in 2006, which is twenty minutes longer. It’s a significant improvement on the theatrical cut. Though the story is still impossible to follow and my problems with the direction remain, the longer cut gives each scene a little more time and texture. Every character is given greater detail, facts about Kelly’s alternative America are introduced organically and a Moby soundtrack enhances the film’s atmosphere. The Cannes cut allows Southland Tales to develop into a strange lucid dreamscape rather than a twitchy mental assault. The restlessness of the theatrical cut is gone, replaced by a trancelike calm in which the incomprehensible makes its own kind of druggy sense. Southland Tales is too enormous and undercooked to ever be remoulded into coherence, but the Cannes Cut is successful in its own way. It strengthens the film’s better qualities and whittles away at its worst.
Whether intentional or not, I now feel that Southland Tales works as an avant-garde deconstruction of Hollywood white elephant art, mashing dumb high politics and grungy celeb culture into a misshapen artefact that doesn’t belong to anyone. I can even recommend the film. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, and that has to count for something.