'Southland Tales'
reviewed by Martin McGrath

Ambition is a tricky thing – apply too little or too much to the mix in any walk of life and both recipes can lead to disaster. Generally speaking, at least in cinema, too much ambition is preferable to too little – especially in a young film maker.

Make no mistake, Southland Tales, Richard Kelly’s sophomore effort as writer and director is a dreadful, almost unwatchable, mess of a film. That the reasons for its failure are noble does nothing to ease the pain of sitting through the film, but those who prefer their cinema to take risks should hope that it won’t be enough to destroy the career of a young man who clearly has talent and ambition in abundance.

Southland Tales is in trouble from the opening moments when a burbling, confused narration tries to introduce us to this near future/alternate reality. Partly this is because we’re walking in halfway through a story, the first half of which was published as three short graphic novels, and partly this is because much of the scenario really makes no sense. Some things are unchanged – war goes on in Iraq, there is a presidential election in the offing, civil liberties are under threat from a government intent on imposing security. But this world is also significantly different; two Texan towns have been nuked, there is a civil insurrection led by ‘neo-Marxists’, America is shattering and there are snipers placed on every street corner.

The ‘plot’ – and that word has to be applied very, very carefully – loosely revolves around the mystery of Boxer Santeros (Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson), an action movie star who has married into the Frosts, a political clan currently fighting for election on a platform of greater security through the introduction of Ident – a computerised security system. Boxer drove into the desert and returned without his memory and when he turns up he’s with porn-star Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), trying to sell a script and caught up in the machinations of the inept neo-Marxists.

Around all this, there’s gibberish about a perpetual motion machine created by Baron Von Westphalen (Wallace Shawn in the most incoherent role of a frequently incoherent career), the story of two brothers returned from Iraq (Seann William Scott as Ronald and Roland) and the half-witted attempts of the neo-Marxists to blackmail the Frosts from their Venice Beach stronghold.

There are moments, flashes really, when you get a sense of the satire Kelly is attempting. There’s a flash of Krysta Now’s chat show (subjects ‘civil rights, education, crime, poverty, abortion, quantum teleportation, teen horniness and war’) that spears the Fox News style of discussion right through the heart. But for the most part, Kelly is only successful at nailing the easy targets. His neo-Marxists are a bunch of wannabe porn stars and actors whose longing to be something Kelly hits square on while his politicians and their hangers-on are grotesques that can’t be taken remotely seriously. None of this is helped by some profoundly awful acting – Johnson, Gellar, Scott, Timberlake, Richardson and Shawn all deliver what must surely be the worst performances of the (in some cases) their long and distinguished careers. It may well be that the script was impossible or that Kelly’s direction sabotaged decent actors, but even allowing for such excuses, there is no escaping the weakness of what’s on the screen.

And a special mention has to go to the treatment of Bai Ling, who plays Serpentine – the assistant/lover of Wallace Shawn’s Baron Von Westphalen. Kelly cleverly manages to deliver a character that effortlessly plays up both sexual and racial stereotypes in one unpleasant package. Nice work!

Southland Tales broadly shares Krysta’s agenda and the sheer number of targets – the political system, the environment, war, civil rights, fame, Hollywood – hints at a desperation to make the film about something (perhaps anything) and also at its great weakness – which is Kelly’s inability to focus on something (anything) for any length of time. Plots, characters, scenes, ideas flash across the screen in an endless, uncontrolled stream, wasting energy and momentum until the whole thing bogs down in a gloopy soup of pseudo-scientific gobbledegook and half-arsed mysticism.

Southland Tales is around 140 minutes long – which, for this reviewer, was divided up into an opening 20 minutes of hopeful confusion, 10 minutes of increasing incomprehension, 15 minutes of anger, five minutes of righteous fury and 90 minutes of feeling very sorry for myself and wishing I’d bought a bigger bag of Revels.

There’s no way to recommend Southland Tales, despite the goodwill Kelly built up with Donnie Darko and the obvious good intentions behind this film. It is a mess. Kelly’s inspirations obviously come from the work of people like Phillip K Dick and Terry Gilliam but this is no Flow My Tears or even a Brazil – indeed the film that Southland Tales most reminded me of was Whoops Apocalypse but without the jokes.