Richard Kelly’s Journey Up His Own Ass: “Southland Tales”

One of the great disappointments in my movie-going life was watching the director’s cut of Donnie Darko. Now I have fond memories of watching DD on video (hee hee hee) on a cool, spring night as my muscles slowly tightened up following a long, Saturday evening run along the FDR. I’d read a little about the movie and had wanted to catch it when it was released theatrically. Unfortunately, its theatrical run was about a nanosecond long, so that didn’t happen. Watching it on video (hee hee hee), I was impressed with the performances of the brother-and-sister actors with the unpronounceable last name (and thought the sister was kinda cute and hoped she showed up in some stuff again). Mostly, though, I felt the movie heralded the beginning of what could be a major Hollywood creative talent. If Richard Kelly could put together a movie like that while in his 20s, I could only imagine what he’d be doing in five or ten years time.

 

Donnie Darko was a bit of a Rorschach blot of a movie. It trafficked in the same suburban surrealism of David Lynch, but unlike Lynch’s pretentious I’m-too-weird-for-story-coherence-and/or-character-development navel-gazing horseshit, Kelly anchored his low-simmering horror to well-drawn, well-acted three-dimensional characters. The prevailing sense of doom was given genuine resonance by the warmly-sketched suburban setting. Kelly even managed to evoke late-‘80s angst and anomie with a few light touches—Donnie’s sister threatens to vote for Dukakis, a montage is set to Thompson Twins’ Head Over Heels—without detouring into period satire.

 

What DD was actually about was, for all intents and purposes, left up to the viewer. I saw it as the struggle of a mentally-ill young man against the breakdown of his psyche and encroaching potential for violence. If the ending didn’t quite make sense, I gave Kelly credit for trying. It was, after all, his first movie.

 

Then I watched the director’s cut and learned that DD actually followed a logic known only to Kelly and decipherable if—and only if—you read the fake time-travel book on the web site. The story had nothing to do with mental illness or our fragile grasp on reality, but instead with “Living Receivers,” “Manipulated Dead,” and, oh yeah, it takes place in a parallel universe. Replace the Darko house with the Starship Enterprise and you pretty much have any late-series Star Trek: The Next Generation episode.  So the movie I saw and admired was pretty much a mistake of filmmaking, existing only because the much stupider movie in Kelly’s head didn’t quite make it to the screen. How much stupider, you ask? Check out this Salon.com piece on it.

 

Five years later, Southland Tales, Kelly’s triumphant follow-up to DD premiered at the Cannes film festival. It promptly blew up like the Hindenburg, hopefully taking Kelly’s career with it. So why, you ask, am I bothering to visit it? Because in subsequent theatrical and DVD release, the corpse of ST (having shed almost an hour of run-time from its original version) is showing signs of life. Critics are now wondering if they weren’t perhaps too hard on the movie. Too taken with the Cannes blood-lust. Maybe, they think, we should give it a second chance. I’m here to shoot it in head so it can’t rise from the dead and menace us for a couple more scenes like the monster in any given slasher movie. Southland Tales is every bit as pompous, ludicrous, and self-absorbed as anything David Lynch has horked up in recent years. It’s just shinier and more pop-culture-obsessed (read: stupider).

 

The plot of Southland Tales is just as pointlessly convoluted as the (apparent) plot of DD only rather than having to divine it yourself, Kelly helpfully provides a voiceover courtesy of Justin Timberlake’s scarred veteran (who inexplicably mans a Barrett .50 caliber rifle turret on Venice Beach) who basically explains to you what’s going on (since there’s no real connective tissue between scenes). Seems in 2005 the US suffered a couple of thermonuclear terrorist attacks in Texas and promptly went to war with, well, damn near everybody. Three years later, America has morphed into a de-facto police state with a Big Brother-ish federal agency called US-IDent monitoring, well, damn near everybody. A plot is put in motion to topple the Republican stranglehold on government by a group of neo-Marxists (uh, isn’t Marxism pretty much deader than Hogan’s goat at this point?) by manipulating a right-wing action-movie actor named Boxer Santaros (a surprisingly good Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) who is suffering from a major case of amnesia. Santoros’s handler is a porn star/reality TV star/talk-show hostess/one-woman brand Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar, making me wonder if seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer were a fluke or if I was just easier to impress in late ‘90s). Meanwhile, America’s oil supply is running out and sweeping in to the rescue is Baron von Westphalen (Wallace Shawn costumed like Yoda’s flamboyantly gay cousin) with a cure-all alternate fuel source called—I shit you not—“fluid karma.” Also factoring into this ungodly mess is a pair of twins Roland and Ronald Taverner. One of them is a racist cop, and the other is a veteran of a battle in Fallujah which scarred Timberlake’s character. And, hey, notice how they almost have the same name? Think that might be significant? And their hands glow.

 

Let’s see, what else is there? An arms dealer who sells out of an ice cream truck. A prophetic screenplay. A reality TV couple who are killed trying to stage their own death. A mysterious body found in the desert. Various blackmail tapes. A mega-zeppelin. Bai Ling being slinky. A lot of high-school level T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost references. And there’s even more than I’m probably forgetting. For the full story, just go here.

 

What this all adds up to is a simple end-of-the world story that Kelly has run through the sausage-grinder of his indignation over the Bush Administration’s policies, along with his tedious use of sci-fi tropes (time rifts, parallel universes) that were stale twenty years ago. Southland Tales might be a comedy. Or a satire. Or a tragedy. Or all of the above. Whatever the case, it manages to fail on pretty much every front. As satire it breaks no new ground. As a comedy, it isn’t really that funny (you laugh at it, not with it). As any kind of conventional narrative, it’s too pointlessly convoluted to follow. As an epic, it’s simply an excess of excess.

 

And while Kelly may indeed be filled with righteous fury over the Bush Administration’s transgressions, this movie really isn’t about the Bush Administration. It’s about Hollywood’s favorite topic: Hollywood. In Kelly’s mind, war, politics, culture, and the very apocalypse itself all converge in that glorious city. Jesus, didn’t 9/11 teach these idiots that they’re not the center of the world?

 

The plot may make even more sense if you read the comic book prequels to the movie (so not kidding), though I can’t imagine why anyone would want to. The characters are one-dimensional and exist solely to advance the plot, and who hell wants to catch up on the further adventures of a bunch of chess-pieces?

 

Pretty much everything that was good about Donnie Darko—the use of actors, setting, mood, story—isn’t simply mishandled here, it’s abandoned. Nowhere to be found in Southland Tales is anything like the exchange in DD when Donnie bitterly asks his mom what it’s like to have a mentally-ill son, and she replies tearfully “wonderful.” Watching Southland Tales, my jaw agape, I was struck by a sudden revelation. It’s actually quite simple. Kelly did indeed make a great film with Donnie Darko. Southland Tales just goes to show that he was too stupid to realize it.