Guilty Pleasures: Southland Tales
By Samuel Hoelker
November 18, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Many people are fanboys, and I’m no exception, although usually of those off the beaten track. Ever since The Visitor, I’ve been a Richard Jenkins fanboy. I get excited every time I see him pop up in a film (even if it’s Step Brothers), and I really think he can do no wrong. Jesse Eisenberg is another one, and not just because he kind of looks like me and acts like me in most of his movies. Were it to come out now, I would even see Cursed. I don’t think my fanboy-ness for Jenkins and Eisenberg, though, come close to my fanboy level of love for Richard Kelly.
Like the rest of my peers, I saw Donnie Darko in high school and thought it was one of the deepest, most thought-provoking movies this side of Fight Club. Although I don’t put it on a pedestal anymore, I still think that it’s one of the most interesting recent films and that it’s a pretty successful example of early viral advertising (the Web site, DVD commentary, and discussion boards are all key in understanding everything in the film). What’s incredible about Donnie Darko, too, is that it was Kelly’s first film. He’s not like Christopher Nolan needing to make Following before he understood how he would do Memento. He dived right in with possibly the ballsiest debut film ever.
Obviously, then, his second film would be the ballsiest second film ever. Southland Tales takes the themes of time travel and the apocalypse that were introduced in Donnie Darko and blows them up to crazier proportions. He also shows us he has great flair for names that I’ve only seen with Wes Anderson before – Boxer Santaros, Jericho Kane, Roland Taverner, Pilot Abilene, Cyndi Pinziki, and Baron von Westphalen all meet up with each other over Independence Day weekend in an alternate 2008.
The Rock (whose professional name change to Dwanye Johnson is as terrible a move as the films he usually chooses to do now) plays Boxer Santaros, a successful movie star engaged to the daughter of a Republican senator vying for the Vice Presidency who now has amnesia and has been living with porn star Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar) who has ties to the leftest underground movement called the “neo-Marxists” who have kidnapped Roland Taverner (Seann William Scott) for a plot to throw the election who was in the military with Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake) who narrates the film for us with direct quotes from the Book of Revelations. You may be asking how this all connects. I’m still kind of asking that same question.
I don’t think I would be giving Southland Tales enough credit to be calling it a “beautiful mistake,” although that’s what it basically is. Kelly is a hell of an ambitious filmmaker, probably the most ambitious one that I know of, and the leap between Donnie Darko to Southland Tales is admirably risky. While Donnie Darko has a full plot whose only fault is that it may not be evident from the film alone, Southland Tales really makes no sense. The plot points all work together, but the motivations are wacky. In fact, I feel like that may even be a Richard Kelly trademark. When the plot becomes too confusing and would be even more confusing to explain to the audience, Kelly decides not to do any explaining at all. Characters are just given an innate sense of knowing what to do to advance the plot. Boxer Santaros even explains what he’s thinking and what the audience needs to know at the end.
Is this poor writing? I don’t believe so; I think it’s fascinating. Kelly has created such a strange world that can’t really be shown in one film (or even the three graphic novels that precede it chronologically), and he gets from point A to point B any damn way he wants. Although I’ve seen it multiple times, and was too flabbergasted the first time I saw it, I think that Southland Tales’s layers can be deciphered on one viewing, without the aid of the Internet. One will just have to not be distracted by all of the crazy, awesome, or hilarious (usually all three) minor aspects of the film.
Hell, one of the funniest moments of the film is when a police car’s window rolls down and we see a cop…played by Jon Lovitz! Moments like that are what make Southland Tales great, although they can take the audience out of the film just long enough to lose their grasp on the situation. If you miss a beat of Southland Tales, it’s hard to find your place again. That’s why I think Southland Tales works great as a multiple-viewing film: you’re too busy noticing the kid from Thumbsucker shooting a bazooka on top of an ice cream truck to truly grasp everything that’s occurring, yet you’re intrigued enough to want to see everything you missed. That’s how I experienced Southland Tales, at least.
Kelly’s really talented at directing actors, as well. Just about all of the acting is one note short of campy, which is about in line with the rest of the film. Does Kelly want us to think that The Rock’s delivery is stilted and strange, or is it actually how The Rock acts? Is Senator Bobby Frost’s speech so much like Bush’s for a deeper reason? Is the line “We’re taking the ATM machine with us to Mexico” supposed to be funny? The acting is so strangely done that it’s almost unsettling.
The acting, though, fits perfectly in the world that Kelly has created. It’s 2008 and the election’s only swing state is California (which seems quite odd, but as I’ve stated earlier, Richard Kelly does what Richard Kelly wants). A few years prior, there were terrorist attacks in El Paso and Abilene, TX, leading to incredibly strict security measures in the US (Visas are required for interstate travel). In addition, Baron von Westphalen (Wallace Shawn!) has created a new kind of energy called “Fluid Karma,” which is self-sustaining, as well as some sort of drug. The tone with which this is all dealt is borderline-deathly serious with a tinge of self-mockery, which fits the film well; the confusion with the tone mirrors the confusion within the film.
Any writing about Southland Tales has to mention the musical number in the middle of the film. In my anticipation leading up to its 2007 release, I obsessively checked the IMDb page, whose synopsis only mentioned that it was a musical during an Independence Day weekend heatwave starring The Rock. Would The Rock be singing? Would there be picnicking during the songs? I can’t say I was disappointed, though, when I found out that the only musical number was Justin Timberlake lip-synching The Killers’s “All These Things That I’ve Done” in an abandoned arcade. What does it mean? Only Richard Kelly knows. The best conclusion I could draw from it is vaguely anti-war, which the film is overall (Kelly has said that he thinks that soldiers are pimps [the good kind]).
When Southland Tales was shown at Cannes, everyone hated it and Kelly had to cut about 20 minutes off. Assuming that the Cannes version was overall similar to the theatrically released version, I’m surprised that anyone would want it cut. Kelly creates a strangely awesome world in Southland Tales whose confusion is its main draw. Its layers may not always make sense, but its ambition is so high that it’s pretty hard not to be fully engaged with it.
I’m proud to love Southland Tales.