FILM REVIEW – SOUTHLAND TALES (2006)
Richard
Kelly’s first film since the amazing Donnie Darko proves to be equally bizarre
and full of great inventive ideas, but ultimately collapses into incoherence.
That doesn’t make the film in anyway unwatchable. It has enough to maintain the
interest and proves to be a much more subversive and violent film than its
predecessor. The film is over-ambitious and has too much going on to make all
its elements knit together. That’s always better than having a film fail for
having too few ideas.
A film that
starts with the outbreak of World War Three always has a lot to live up to.
This one starts when terrorists manage to nuke Texas. The War against Terrorism
suddenly goes into overdrive. America expands its involvement in the near east,
and reintroduces the draft. Oil runs out due to the war, and alternative
sources of energy receive a great deal of investment. Internal security
measures are also taken to extremes. The Patriot Act leads to Te establishment
of Ident, a massive surveillance programme that seems able to watch anything
and everyone at once. The Internet is no longer free, as computers are able to
read the fingerprints of their users to serve as better protection than simple
passwords. Movement between States is impossible without passports and visas.
Voting rights are denied to all except the rich citizens of Southern California
– the Southlands of the title. With the
need for finger and thumbprints to hack computers, there is a huge increase in
illegal finger trafficking in the US. Coincidentally, the Americans get Japan
to stay neutral in their war against Iraq by gaining a treaty with the Japanese
Emperor. This has to be signed in blood and as a goodwill gesture he is willing
to have a finger cut off. When the crude meat cleaver severs his entire hand,
the Yanks cheerfully tell him that the treaty does allow for a six-inch margin
of error in the cutting radius. It’s a scene that has nothing to do with the
plot at all, but it is added for being funny. Similar analysis may apply to
other striking scenes. There is a rampant capitalism in the film, as the
decadent south Landers spend and party on regardless. A car advert is launched
featuring computer graphic cars that actually make love to one another. It’s an
extreme extention of the surreal way cars are advertised today, and that is
much in the spirit of the film. Ident is the modern US tightened security
system in extremis. The nuking of Texas is 9/11 on the grand scale, etc.
Against
this extraordinary backdrop, Dwayne Johnson (no longer calling himself The
Rock) gives a very good intense performance as a one time Hollywood action
hero, Boxer Santaros, who has woken up in the desert with no memory of how he
got there. He staggers home to his girlfriend, Sarah Michelle-Gellar, who has a
terrific role as washed out former porn star Krysta Now, trying to re-invent
herself as a pop singer and chat show host. She gets many of the film’s best
lines, including;
“Scientists
are saying the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally
predicted.”
And
“Join us
for an in-depth discussion of the penetrating issues facing society today.
Issues like abortion, terrorism, crime, poverty, social reform, quantum
teleportation, teen horniness and war.”
As well as
being watched by the near omnipresent Ident, (mainly run by Miranda Richardson)
the couple are spied on by Pilot Abilene, (Justin Timberlake), an embittered
veteran from the Iraq war we are already familiar with, who serves as the
film’s narrator as he waits on a beach front rooftop with a high powered rifle
to assassinate people when he sees fit to do so. He does briefly get to sing a
song too, surrounded by Marolyn Monroe lookalkes.
The other
key character is Roland Taverner, played by Sean William Scott, a
schizophrenic, racist LAPD cop, who has a twin brother who has become a
neo-Marxist. .
Santaros is
working on a script for a film about a man who develops a theory that the World
is slowing down in its orbit of the Sun, at a very slow rate, but that in doing
so, it affects human consciousness, and creates time-space continuum
distortions. The script causes alarm for certain scientists who know the theory
is actually based on their knowledge, so Santaros becomes the subject of a
manhunt. Neo-Marxists in the US also
want the actor to embroil him in their plans to overthrow the government (still
run by George W Bush) and get the Ident policies stopped. A Southlands wide
referendum on Ident is pending, and known as Article 69. Much is made of
Krysta’s rather different appreciation of the number. Accused of being behind
the leak of the information on Ident to the terrorists with ‘Are you Deep
Throat Two?’ she replies blankly, ‘No, I wasn’t in that movie’.
Santaros
and Taverner end up united when Santaros joins him for a reality TV show actor
going out to fight crime with a cop show. They are called to a domestic
disturbance between two newlyweds, actually actors rehearsing for a show. This
is a set up in which the actors are to be seen dying on screen, unknown to the
cop and actor. They find themselves joined by another cop, who takes charge of
the investigation, and actually shoots the couple dead before their fake bullet
wounds are applied by remote control.
Taverner is shocked by the incident and runs off to make peace with his
estranged twin brother. Santaros is accused of the crime in a Parallax View
style conspiracy, and finds himself, and girlfriend Krysta Now pursued by all
and sundry.
With Pilot
Abilene reciting passages from revelations, it seems the events are getting
more apocalyptic as the Southlands citizens pursue their own agendas.
Events
culminate as the election and referendum votes are counted. Santaros is invited
to the A-list party on the giant Mega-Zeppelin, flying over Los Angeles. And
while there, he pieces together why he’s the centre of the conspiracies. A time
rift had been found the desert due to an Earthquake. Unwilling to send
experimental monkeys into the rift, the government chose to throw an actor in
instead. A corpse found on the site was actually Santaros past self, as he had to
be killed to prevent him from meeting himself and thus causing a time paradox.
Unfortunately, Santaros did not travel in alone. The cop who had to drive him
to the portal in the desert had fallen into the time vortex too – Taverner is
not twins – he is one and the same man, and amidst the increasing anarchy on
the streets the men meet and shake hands in a burnt out crashed ice cream
truck, which begins to float skyward.
Enraged at
his use in such a conspiracy, Santaros blows up the zeppelin, killing most of the
major characters. The last thing heard before the airship explodes like the
Hindenberg is the line ‘The party’s over. Have a nice apocalypse.’
In the ice
cream truck, the man shaking hands with himself, as one half of him threatens
to commit suicide, realizes that if he lets go or stops liking himself the ice
cream truck will rediscover gravity and he will die too. The film ends on that
conundrum.
Confusing,
but fun, with enough great ideas to stop the film from being entertaining or
intelligent. Sadly, that was not reflected in the box office. Takings amounted
to $356,408 – the film cost
$15 million to produce.
© Copyright. Arthur
Chappell
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