Donnie Darko seemed to signal that newbie director Richard Kelly was someone to watch out for. The film was so unique in its exploration of one troubled High Schooler's life that it not only put its main actor, Jake Gyllenhaal, on everyone's radar as a leading man, but also seemed to be the emergence of a new interesting filmmaking voice in Richard Kelly. In the two decades since Donnie Darko, Kelly has only directed two films and has directed nothing since the November 2009 release of his film The Box. What exactly happened here? Well, part of it may be the divisive reception of his follow-up to Donnie Darko, Southland Tales, a 2007 political satire so weird that it makes Donnie Darko and its giant rabbit look a mundane Max Keeble's Big Move by comparison.
What exactly is the plot of Southland Tales? Well, that's hard to say. Apparently, the movie lost twenty minutes of footage after its initial May 2006 Cannes premiere, so maybe that has something to do with the plot alternating from being convoluted to flat-out nonsensical, but then again, the whole story is so byzantine that there's no way just twenty minutes of deleted scenes could add clarity to the proceedings. What we're left with is an expansive crime saga involving screenwriter Boxer Santoras (Dwayne Johnson), his pornstar media sensation girlfriend Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), a pair of roles for Sean William Scott, the fate of the free world, a new energy source and Justin Timberlake as an omnipresent narrator figure who frequently sits behind a giant Gatling gun.
Everything is wacky in Southland Tales. Not just a touch wacky, this movie hits the ground running as seriously strange from frame one and only gets more and more peculiar from there. What semblance of a plot there is seems to be an attempt to make a near-future science-fiction satire about a number of topical issues in the Bush era, including alternative resources, the ubiquity of reality television and government surveillance. Southland Tales wants to be something like a Ray Bradbury novel but ends up being like what would happen if Ed Wood tried to mimic a Paul Verhoeven movie. Maybe Southland Tales missed the mark on what it intended to be (though I imagine that only Richard Kelly can definitively answer that) but good news, it's still compulsively watchable to a shocking degree.
Honestly, I was totally caught off-guard by just how much fun Southland Tales is to watch. Sometimes such enjoyment comes from being appalled at bizarre pieces of casting or at certain lines of pivotal dialogue that just don't work. No matter how many times Southland Tales drags it up, "Pimps don't commit suicide" doesn't work as a line of dramatic importance while a melodramatic confrontation between Boxer and a secret admirer had me in stitches at the overwrought line delivers. But other times the whole farce does manage to produce intentional laughs and entertainment. If you throw out enough darts, you're bound to eventually hit the dartboard and Southland Tales does have its fair share of moments where it manages to land somewhere on its own dartboard. There's no way hysterical moments like the extended interactions between Amy Poehler and Wood Harris, including an improvised argument when they pretend to be a married couple, could be ever be conceived to be played fully straight-faced, for instance, and that moment emerges as one of the successful instances of comedy.
Though it leaves something to be desired in execution, it should also be noted that the decision to play everything to such extreme degrees of exaggeration does make sense as a concept. I mentioned Paul Verhoeven earlier and Southland Tales does remind me of Showgirls in how it wants to play as an allegory for real-life societal woes so bizarre that the only way they can be lampooned is by doing the most extreme and exaggerated storytelling possible. Southland Tales isn't as successful as Showgirls but the work of writer/director Richard Kelly on the former feature is very much possessed by the same spirit of stylized social commentary that served as the crux of Showgirls. They're two sides of the same coin, and since I thoroughly enjoyed Showgirls, it shouldn't be a surprise then that I also managed to find myself wildly entertained by Southland Tales.
How can you not be entertained by a movie this messy yet so impressively bold? Southland Tales is a whole lot of ideas that don't mesh well together, including a late-in-the-game reveal about alternate dimensions and clones that feels like the textbook definition of abrupt. But the constant barrage of new kooky ideas constantly kept me engrossed, in an attempt to analyze the political climate that emerged in America during the presidential reign of George W. Bush, Southland Tales just embraces every ludicrous science-fiction concept it can muster with a bear hug. It similarly fully embraces a cast comprised primarily of comedic actors playing heavily against type in largely serious roles, which is another part of the whole Southland Tales production that proves to be fascinating in both a "watching a trainwreck" kind of way and in a genuinely intriguing sort of manner.
The sight of Jon Lovitz just showing up in the role of a grim racist police officer with nary a joke to deliver is a piece of oddball casting that doesn't really work at all while other pieces of casting, including a random cameo by Curtis Armstrong in the climax, aren't so much good or bad as they are more puzzling. But then other comedic actors in the cast actually register decently convincing performances, particularly Seann William Scott who isn't half-bad playing dual roles. And then there's Justin Timberlake, who gets to be at the center of the best scene of the entire movie. I am, of course, talking about that sequence where his character walks around an abandoned arcade(?) and lip-syncs All These Things That I Have Done by The Killers as old-timey back-up dancers accompany his "singing'. This evocative scene is actually filmed and edited quite well and captures the characters internal emptiness in a creative manner. It's an evocative scene brimming with creative gusto that serves as a microcosm of the sort of imagination that makes Southland Tales a bold creative endeavor as well as a hysterically ludicrous mess of a movie
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna roller-blade on home.
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