Southland Tales (2006)

 

Director: Richard Kelly

Screenplay: Richard Kelly

Cast: Dwayne Johnson as Boxer Santaros; Seann William Scott as Private Roland Taverner / Officer Ronald Taverner; Sarah Michelle Gellar as Krysta Now; Mandy Moore as Madeline Frost Santaros; Justin Timberlake as Private Pilot Abilene; Miranda Richardson as Nana Mae Frost; Wallace Shawn as Baron von Westphalen; Bai Ling as Serpentine; Nora Dunn as Cyndi Pinziki; John Larroquette as Vaughn Smallhouse; Kevin Smith as Simon Theory

An Abstract List Candidate

 

We're a bisexual nation in denial....

As I consider it, every decade should have a notorious film like Southland Tales. They may not have to be a great film, or even in the science fiction genre, but they should be an attempt at capturing the zeitgeist of the era including the pop culture of the moment. There can be more than one per era, but Southland Tales definitely feels for better or for worse a nice exclamation of the 2000s.

It is worth bringing up another example for this idea of mine, a perfect example for capturing the nineties' zeitgeist being Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days (1995), which juggle science fiction material (recorded memories alongside their voyeuristic nature) alongside pre-Millennium anxiety and an explicit parallel to the Rodney King riots of Los Angeles. Southland Tales, surprisingly, is also set in Los Angeles, also is mixing real life politics with science fiction, but is also at times intentionally funny. Like Bigelow's production, which hurt her career, Southland Tales became an albatross for Richard Kelly, the Donnie Darko (2001) director following up his cult hit with this, knee deep in the George Dubya Bush presidency of the Patriot Act and conflict in the Middle East, hovering up the music and pop culture stars from the era in a film which was not well greeted originally.

Talking about Southland Tales means, as well as admitting how weird it is, about addressing its notoriety. Richard Kelly's career, baring The Box (2009), has never really gotten going and Southland Tales was an insanely ambitious project, a six chapter tale with the first three graphic novels, followed by a two and a half hour epic starring a gamut of figures that exist between 2000s pop music and the World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment company. Said film, set in a time after a nuke is set off in Texas, leading to mass surveillance and a strange conspiracy involving an amnesiac action star Boxer Santos (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson), premiered at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival and went as well as a zeppelin made of lead.

I openly admit that I hated the film when I first saw it, and even now, I will admit that until you embrace the film, it can be a perplexing mass of tangents, something I have grown to love now that has be passed. Set over three days, Southland Tales moves towards the end of the world, as described by Private Pilot Abilene who is played by Justin Timberlake, a physically scarred war veteran who mans a gun turret by the beach and deals in illegal liquid karma, part of a new energy source in this world where World War III took place and targeted oil rich companies in the Middle East, leading to an energy source based on ocean waves which has a side result of a new narcotic. With mind to the Cannes Cut and the Theatrical Cut being now able to be both seen, the later with a lot of exposition brought in to make sense of the world and the Cannes Cut not being as difficult to grasp, if missing key pieces, a lot of the issue with Southland Tales is less the film being difficult but that it throws so much onto the viewer. A television series, in a madder alternative world, would have had a time to bring in all this material too and likely have been cancelled after one season, as Kelly had the luck to be able to make this film in the first place but was burnt by this type of storytelling being an acquired taste for many.

Beyond this, many pieces are shown to us and rummaged about in a mass. Santos, married to the daughter of a Republican politician in the midst of a campaign trail, wandered out of the desert with no knowledge of he is, with a porn star Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar) his new girlfriend and co-author of a pulpy movie script with him that accidentally foretells the end of the world. This apocalypse involves two Sean William Scotts, that Liquid Karma's creator Baron von Westphalen (Wallace Shawn), and his cabal of assistants including Bai Ling and Poltergeist's Zelda Rubinstein, are sending monkeys through dimensional rips and are aware their sea powered energy is starting to slow down the Earth's rotations, and that pimps do not commit suicide. Add to this a neo-Marxist movement to try to overthrow the Republicans, including an underground severed thumb trade, and a plan to blackmail people through a staged racist cop shooting with an avant-garde poetry duo in comically big prosthetic noses, and this film does skirt a line between relevance even into the modern day and being ridiculous.

And Southland Tales is as mad as a box of frogs, but unlike other scattershot projects, this feels too perfectly focused to have been merely indulgent. For everything that feels like Richard Kelly's project was escaping out from under him, like the decision to have three graphic novels begin the tale, there are also intentional moments of real pathos and are legitimately hilarious, too well thought-out to have been stupid or bad creative decisions. Also of significance is how even the cast there is, whether on purpose or not, feels itself a deliberate mirror of the era. Pointedly, this reflects the era post 9/11, starting in a prologue (shown as a home video shot by two young boys) of a nuke being deliberately dropped on Abilene, Texas. This escalates to an extreme version of mass surveillance, which allows it always in case of possible terrorist activities, and where someone even has to monitor the cameras set up in the toilets at LAX airport as part of their job. Whilst pockets of seriousness are here, Richard Kelly finds the impending end of the world as a bizarre carnival.

In the centre of this is Dwayne Johnson who, sadly due to the failure of this film, was cautioned away from these types of projects. This is a shame as, if you had seen any of his work as a professional wrestler, Johnson was a bolt of pure energy where he finally showed his persona and he is exceptional here. His wrestling work if you were to look back on it sadly has dated in places, due to a lot of it being around a hero or villain who used bullying and homophobic/transphobic content in his speech, but Johnson also changed considerably when he became the film star, practically a different human being over the 2000s on who took his best virtues, his ability to cut speeches with energy and his body language from professional wrestling, and bring it to a new career. I remember watching in wrestling of him as a kid (and returning to it) which shows he was capable of being either the charismatic hero or the obnoxious heel. The time period I grew up with him was even when his dalliances with Hollywood would eventually take him away in the early 2000s, even incorporating it into an obnoxious arsehole that looked down on wrestling despite only having been in The Scorpion King (2002) as a lead. This is Johnson before he had fully become a Hollywood star and at that time, which is a fascinating sight to see, just after his pro wrestling career as a full time job and just before a full film career. Playing a nervous and clueless figure trying to rationalise the madness around him, he is good. Just in his nervous hand gestures, he is transferring his craft from one medium to another.

The cast in general flirts with other areas of entertainment, even in a limited time, and all of them stand out. Even minor roles being taken by the likes of Christopher Lambert, as an illegal arms dealer working out of an ice cream truck, or Jon Lovitz stealing a scene as a psychotic cop stand out. Seann William Scott, who would still have been seen as Stifler from the American Pie films, is probably the person who has the least scenes but manages to gain sympathy as a huge part of the film, playing literally two people, whilst Justin Timberlake gets arguably the best scene, a drug induced musical number where he lip synchs to The Killer's All These Things I've Done, a song whose vague lyrics go gain weight in this context. The only person who feels they have to stretch is Sarah Michelle Gellar. I have come to appreciate her role as Krysta Now, but the character itself could have actually been better if an alternative casting choice and/or a different characterisation had transpired. I can suspend disbelief of an alternative world where Krysta Now has a talk show, where she and other porn stars debate topics like teen horniness with full explicit swearing. Even the fact Christine Now has her own single is not that insane - an iconic disco song More, More, More is by real life adult star Andrea True - but probably I can see needed another television star who had a bit more salt to her personality take the character further. An actual adult film star from the era would have added to the weight of the character, and to the idea of Kelly bringing in a variety of pop cultural figures of the 2000s.  The touch of being a stereotypical simpleton, whilst leading to so much that is funny, does also feel like Richard Kelly's one mistake in juggling the serious and the comedic, which does not really equate with many female adult stars if you find interviews with them.  

Regardless, what makes Southland Tales what it is, a huge factor to how it likely became as decisive as it did but there were defenders even at that original release, was that it plays a merry farce of the material. It is very political, but the left wing characters are punch down to as being pathetic, ridiculous or petty as the conservatives are seen as tyrants, conspirators or just evil rich white people. Kelly can have a major scene, where the armoured police force raids the Marxist Anarchist group trying to overthrow the political system, only to both cast an actor with dwarfism as a SWAT member for a clear height contrast, but never ridiculed, but also having filmmaker Eli Roth have a cameo being shot dead on a toilet. As a result, there are moments of real sincerity, but also a fake advert for a liquid powered car literally fucking its competition through the tailpipe, which the characters in film even find bizarre.

Does this even work? That is difficult for me to say now as I have lived with the film so long it has won me over. Even a criticism early on of Sarah Michelle Gellar's character does not mean I do not love the film exactly as it is, more so as the theatrical version against the notorious Cannes premiere version is good enough as it is, with more initial exposition to set the world up and less odd tangents about Dungeons & Dragons which never plays out in the main narrative. If it is intentional how complicated the film's plot is, Kelly envisions the period he made the film as one of pure weirdness, as apt as scoring the film to music of the time such as the Black Rebel Motorcyclists or Muse, the NME magazine darlings of the era,  or having Moby compose the soundtrack. When it works, I find Southland Tales does succeed especially if you consider parts of it as comedy, to which it can be hilarious and plays as melodrama at times.

Johnson is great as mentioned, making his reaction stick to more mainstream roles sad, but you have many interesting roles. One, for example, is Wallace Shawn as Baron von Westphalen who gets to relish the lines and delivery before you also have to include Bai Ling, a very unconventional cult actress, adding her idiosyncratic acting or filmmaker Kevin Smith in so much prosthetic makeup to the point I have not realised all this time he was the character he was until this review. And there are many moments that stand out. Some are clearly indebted to others - in lieu to David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001), he hired singer Rebekah Del Rio to perform a rousing version of the Star Bangle Banner with a string quarter that would make anyone patriotic - but also a lot of sincerity.

Considering its opening, a tragedy, there is by the end of Southland Tales a melancholy. It is an insane film at times, juggling tones that many would find off putting, such as a woman demanding to give The Rock a blowjob at a crowded beach with a firearm at hand, but does not lose the fact, as Strange Days did, that its mania gives way to a lot of despair. As Kathryn Bigelow's also possessed in its darkness and chaotic finale, both films conclude around a giant party around the whole of Los Angeles with violence breaking out, coming off with exhilaration but loss. Strange Days in fact ended in hope, whilst in Southland Tales has the world end not with a bang, but with a pratfall, an ATM machine being dragged to Mexico, a floating ice cream truck, and a mirror image forgiving a man for his failures so he can find solace. Kelly sadly was hit hard by the film's notoriety, and did not make a film ever in the rest of the 2000s and 2010s, only produce or write a couple. It is a shame as, as is mostly the case, these notorious failures are usually compelling. Southland Tales for me is also brilliant.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None