CinePhillyist Reviews... Southland Tales

Yeah, I know. It doesn't make sense when you see it in the movie, either. The narration (provided by, of all people, Justin Timberlake, who plays a former soldier in the Iraq War, now discharged and back home dealing drugs, after having been injured by friendly fire) ensures us that the film is telling the story of an actor named Boxer Santaros (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson), but really Boxer is just a living McGuffin - the person everybody fights over and uses, thus generating the action of the plot. Boxer is married to a Senator's daughter, but then disappears after a weird event in the desert outside LA. When he shows up again he has amnesia and promptly gets involved in an affair, and co-writes a prophetic screenplay, with a porn star named Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar). He then gets caught up in various political intrigues and other plots by various factions, starts confusing himself with the character in his screenplay, and things just continue to get weirder and more confusing (and Kelly even ends up bringing time travel into it again) until the movie finally, blessedly comes to an end.

The cast is ridiculous. John Larroquette plays an aide to the president. Wallace Shawn of Princess Bride fame plays the hideously ugly and disturbing Baron Von Westphalen (the guy who developed the alternative energy), whose gang of weirdos includes a bunch of familiar B character actors, as well as Bai Ling and that creepy lady from Poltergeist. Christopher Lambert (!) shows up as a guy who sells guns out of an ice cream truck. His connection to the rest of the characters and story is never really explained, although he does at one point, for no reason I could understand, drug and kidnap one of the other main characters, a racist cop - or possibly the racist cop's terrorist twin brother? Or a different version of him from another time? - both of whom are played by Seann William Scott. Then there's Jon Lovitz as another, even worse, cop; Mandy Moore as the daughter of a Senator and the wife of Santaros; and Cheri Oteri and Amy Poehler as weird, terrorist, Neo-Marxist versions of themselves.

Sadly, with all of that talent floating around, the most powerful and effective scene in the entire film is one starring Justin Timberlake—Justin fucking Timberlake!—lip synching to a rock song in a music video-like drug-induced fantasy sequence. It's visually stunning and surreal and fantastic and moving and funny all at once, and I think that was Kelly's plan for the film as a whole - a plan which failed.

The main problem, I think, is indecision. Kelly never seems to have decided what he wanted the movie to really be about, or even what kind of movie he wanted to make. Is it a straight-up goofy comedy? Because there are a number of pretty funny scenes, along with a lot of other scenes that are clearly supposed to be funny, but really aren't particularly (the "porn stars are dumb" gag is kind of old, dude). Or is it a serious satire of politics and consumerism and sexuality and war? Because there's a lot of attempts at that here, too, although a lot of it isn't particular insightful or fresh. The Hustler logo on the side of the tank is pretty clever, for instance, but Kubrick made that point a lot more powerfully in Dr. Strangelove decades ago. Or is the film meant to be a mystical meditation on the end of the world? A post-modern destruction of the wall between reality and imagination? A profound statement on the place of humanity in the modern world? It's apparently trying to be all of these things at once, and thus failing to be any of them convincingly. There are definite stabs at mysticism and religiosity, but nothing concrete or interesting is stated on those fronts. The thing with the screenplay mirroring reality in a prophetic fashion is kind of interesting, but it doesn't make any sense and it doesn't go anywhere. And the only attempt at profundity is a statement repeated throughout the second half of the film, and used again as the final line: "Pimps don't commit suicide." If that's the way you want to sum up your movie, I'm really not sure why anybody should waste their time sitting around watching the whole thing.

Poster via AICN