Heart of Dullness: LOST RIVER

Ryan Gosling makes his directorial debut with Lost River, an impressively controlled artful nothing. It’s 95 minutes of misfiring aesthetic signifiers coming from the same impulses that led him to work with Nicolas Winding Refn twice (in the good Drive and awful Only God Forgives). Here Gosling loves to provide striking images, woozy with neon and darkness, blood and fire. There are slow motion tracking shots to nowhere, lingering on hardships, and long looks at extreme violence real and imagined, literal and figurative. Dripping with empty visual interest, it lays out its graphical approach quickly, and then grows monotonous. As for character and story, his screenplay regards them as just more elements of design rather than features unto themselves. As a result, the film is a static, uninvolving slog, shorn free of narrative momentum and symbolic importance alike.

That’s not to say the movie is devoid of ideas. It’s a vague statement on the decrepit state of the American dream at its lowest points. Finding his story among the marginalized and impoverished, Gosling films Detroit’s ruins as a stand in for a fictional city, Lost River, drowned by economic disaster. Residents are fleeing. Structures and infrastructure are crumbling. Exploitation and arson are common activities. A nearby dam was once a promise of progress, but has only left an underwater neighborhood to show for it. In all this decay we meet a single mom (Christina Hendricks) about to lose her home, unable to pay her predatory mortgage. Gosling piles on miseries and films them with a surface beauty, taking aesthetic pleasure in pain.

Hendricks’s sons, a young man (Iain De Caestecker) and a toddler (Landyn Stewart), are smudged and sad. Their neighbors, a mute old woman (Barbara Steele) and her granddaughter (Saoirse Ronan), live amidst stacks of hoarded garbage. There’s a depressed feeling hanging over it all. Where’s the hope, when they’re the last remaining people on the block? Those who’ve remained can barely scrape out a living. A sleazy bank manager (Ben Mendelsohn) sees how desperate Hendricks is to make payments and offers her a job at a macabre nightmare burlesque run by a horror-loving madam (Eva Mendes) quick to splash fake blood. Meanwhile, her older son makes money selling copper scavenged out of abandoned buildings and runs afoul of a self-proclaimed scrap metal kingpin (Matt Smith).

This villainous presence – a howling buzzcut weirdo driven around in a vintage car with an easy chair attached in the back – is just one of many oddball elements presented entirely straight-faced.  (I didn’t even mention his habit of cutting off people’s lips with scissors.) There are strange rituals, dreadful recurring symbols, talk of a town curse, a scene where a woman slowly cuts her face and peels back the skin, and a musical interlude involving a creepy rendition of an old Bob Nolan western song. There’s certainly a dreamy animating spirit behind this, tumbling from odd sight to surreal aside. But there’s never a coherent worldview aside from how cool it’s supposed to look and how seriously we’re to take it, sub-Lynchian bafflement without a point.

The actors are mostly left to their own devices, doing as much as they can with as little as they’re given. Gosling doesn’t appear to be interested in using actors for anything other than how his cinematographer Benoît Debie (Spring Breakers, Enter the Void) can place them in the frame. The result is a movie of moments and images without connective tissue logical, emotional, narrative, or political. There are feints towards all of those, but no actual strikes. Gosling proves himself a filmmaker of terrific aesthetic control. He could be a great director someday. But this is a most enervating start. He’s proven he can conjure an interesting look, if one borrowed from Refn, Cianfrance, Malick, and even some directors he hasn’t worked with. If he gets behind the camera again, let’s hope he can find something to say.

Passed Down: THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES

If you go to see The Place Beyond the Pines, you’ll pay to see one movie and get two more at no extra charge. That’s not because the film’s overstuffed, but because of the film’s structure. It’s built out of three stories that are separate and yet flow into each other, not so much evolving as filling up with evocative resonances and echoes. Writer-director Derek Cianfrance must like this sort of thing. His last film, the great, harrowing relationship drama Blue Valentine, cut back and forth, balancing the beginning and end of a relationship, tentative young romance smashing inevitably into aged tensions. With his new film, Cianfrance has created something of an intimate epic. Running nearly two-and-a-half hours, it feels long, spanning two generations, confidently shifting the protagonist not once, not twice, but three times, leaving the structure feeling like three short stories placed back to back.

As the film starts, we’re introduced to a drifter, a handsome stunt motorcyclist played by Ryan Gosling. He travels with a carnival, breaking hearts and making a little bit of money in each town. That routine changes when an old flame (Eva Mendes) introduces him to his son. Now desperate to be a part of his child’s life, he attempts to settle down and soon resorts to making money in a less-than-legal way. That’s how we meet an ambitious young cop who becomes the film’s new focus. He’s played by Bradley Cooper as a proud, privileged man desperate to make something out of his life. He’s a man whose rich father (Harris Yulin) and worried wife (Rose Byrne) can barely understand why he’s chosen such a risky profession. I’ll save the film’s last story unspoiled except to say that it riffs on the choices these two men make and the impact they have on the next generation.

Cianfrance briskly establishes vivid detail out of casually precise production design and meticulous performances. A fairly early scene of adrenaline, suspense and daredevilry ends with Gosling vomiting on the rough wood floor in the back of an empty cube truck. I could almost feel the sweat, sawdust and stink in my nostrils. When the cut away from this scene starts up a Springsteen song on the soundtrack, it was only underlining what, by that point, was more than clear. We’re seeing a blue-collar story song of a film, a meandering tribute to the working class. Gosling and Cooper are playing characters who use what they do to define who they are and their attempts to either live up to and break away from those definitions lead them down different, yet in many ways similarly perilous, roads.

It’s thematically overreaching and narratively overdetermined and inefficient, but there’s an absorbing pleasure to the way the film plays out. It doesn’t come together as smoothly or completely as its structure suggests, but there are nonetheless satisfying echoes across three discreet plot arcs, like when an early long shot of Gosling riding a motorcycle down a wooded two-lane road is mirrored in a late long shot of a teenager riding a bike down the very same road. It’s effective. Cianfrance (with co-writers Ben Coccio and Darius Marder) has made a film of immersive plotting with the harder-than-it-looks pleasure of narrative curiosity. I cared as I wondered what would happen next for the characters and was eager for the unfolding events to tell me more. There’s a confidence to the film’s ambition and indulgence that I was willing to accept. The destination may be slightly less than the journey promises, but the sheer narrative pleasure kept me more than enough engaged.

Bad Cop, Bad Cop: THE OTHER GUYS

It has slowly become apparent to me that Adam McKay is one of the best directors currently working in studio comedies. That’s not to say he alone is responsible for all of the recent great comedies, far from it, but he’s far beyond the typical style of a studio comedy that does little more than set a camera in front of funny people and wait for the magic. McKay’s a skillful filmmaker. He is at his best when he has plenty of genre or period bric-a-brac to play around with like the cool 70’s vibe of Anchorman or the deep-fried NASCAR-crazy South of Talladega Nights. He pushes the styles and production design so heavily that by the time his dialogue grows increasingly off-the-wall with bizarre one-liners and the plot slips towards the surreal it feels like a natural outgrowth of the surroundings. (Maybe that’s why his last film, Step Brothers, didn’t work as well for me, as it contained the same level of weirdness rooted in a world more like our own).

With The Other Guys, McKay gets a chance to direct a buddy-cop action-comedy.  With the help of cinematographer Oliver Wood (who has worked on the Bourne films, Face/Off, and Die Hard 2 in his career), it contains enough good-looking slam-bang spectacle to rival a Bruckheimer production, but it deploys its set pieces with skill and energy that could only arise from comedy. The film opens with a literal explosion of action-packed hilarity with super-cops Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson careening through a car chase gun-battle that is both thrilling on an action level and hilarious in its (barely) exaggerated presentation. Collateral damage flips around the frames that catch shattering glass and bullet impacts in the same moments as the overheated machismo of its two cops. By the time the sequence reaches its fiery conclusion, the movie had me in its grasp.

Jackson and Johnson do a fine job inhabiting, and poking fun at, the types of overblown action heroes they typically play. They’re quickly cast aside, though, in favor of the movie’s real heroes, the cops who sit in offices far more than cop cars and fire up computers far more than weapons. Yes, police partners Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg never patrol much farther than the water cooler. Ferrell’s okay with that, preferring to remain in his comfort zone as a meek, nerdy police accountant and going home every night to his plain wife (Eva Mendes). Wahlberg, however, is boiling inside, ready to spread his wings and soar as the hero he knows he is. After accidentally shooting a famous person (a funny cameo), regaining his dignity may be harder than he thinks. Soon enough, the mismatched pair get sucked into a larger conspiracy involving all kinds of very real threats, which include, but are by no means limited too, a mysterious Australian thug (Ray Stevenson), a slimy lawyer and SEC employee (Andy Buckley), overzealous colleagues (Rob Riggle and Damon Wayans Jr.), a creep of a Wall Street big-shot (Steve Coogan), and, of course, the police chief (Michael Keaton) who’s always saying that they’ve gone too far and then threatening to confiscate their weapons.

Under the direction of Adam McKay, from a script he co-wrote with Chris Henchy, The Other Guys has the specifics of a cop movie down perfectly. It’s full of fun supporting turns (between this and Toy Story 3, I hope we’re at the start of a Keaton comeback), funny little moments of detective work, and well-used action beats. But the film also manages to use the genre as a springboard for the kind of weird digressions that make McKay’s films so memorable. This film stays closer to what’s expected from a buddy-cop film, with the weirdest moments having nothing on the equivalent moments in, say, Anchorman’s news-team brawl or Talladega Night’s meal-time prayer. Here, the bizarre slips in through the flashbacks to Wahlberg’s shooting accident and Ferrell’s unpredictable part-time job from his college years, the phrase “I’m going to break your hip” spoken as a token of affection, a charming series of economic charts during the end credits, or a night of drunkenness portrayed through a frozen tableau of weird and (kind of) wonderful sight gags. It also fills up all the cracks in the dialogue with odd asides and goofy monologues, not to mention the way the action set pieces sometimes include dazzling moments of the ridiculous sailing in from left field.

Ferrell and Wahlberg make a great team as comedy, but a horrible team as cops. They manage to botch nearly every major moment of police work they take on, and yet because of the likability of the two leads, there’s always the hope that they’ll succeed one of these times. It’s strange to watch a movie where the two protagonists manage to mess up nearly everything they try. These two cops are always trying to figure out the central mystery, but can never quite get there. It’s almost like what might have happened if, say, Luis Buñuel helped direct The French Connection.

Un-Caged: BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS

The last several years have proven that there is a large market for bad Nicolas Cage thrillers. Remember National Treasure? Ghost Rider? Bangkok Dangerous? National Treasure: Book of Secrets? They all opened at the top of the box office charts on their opening weekend despite being largely terrible. For some reason, the general public will only see Cage if he has odd intensity and likably exaggerated mannerisms tied to a thin character wading through schlock. He’s a great actor though, so it’s a shame that his best projects have a tendency to slip through the cracks. In theory, that shouldn’t have happened to Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, which is at once a very good sleazy thriller and a perfectly marketable film. Why, then, has the film seen only a small limited release and is now being limped out on DVD and Blu-ray? Maybe it’s because it happens to be so cheerfully wicked in its insanity.

Helmed by the great German auteur, and suspected crazy person, Werner Herzog, the movie features Cage as a New Orleans cop who injures his back saving a prisoner during Hurricane Katrina. This cop gets addicted to his painkillers and then starts to self-medicate in addition to his prescriptions by lifting some confiscated cocaine from the evidence room. Soon, he’s wandering the ravaged streets of New Orleans, lifting drugs off of unsuspecting addicts and snorting it right in front of them. He tortures and badgers witnesses and suspects, barks out orders, makes backroom deals and bargains, and generally looks at the world through a stare of vague, bug-eyed intensity.  Also, he’s investigating the brutal killings of an entire immigrant family.

Herzog and Cage don’t care much about making this man likable, or even relatable, but they aren’t following him down increasingly depraved paths like Abel Ferrara did with Harvey Keitel in their Bad Lieutenant (1992), a film that’s related to this one in name only. (The Bad Lieutenant part of the title was forced on the picture by a producer with the subtitle Herzog’s idea). Instead, Cage simply presents a man ravaged by circumstance and temperament, mirroring the locale. Herzog’s camera follows his central character through a crumbled and waterlogged city filled with slimy characters and creatures (including hallucinated iguanas and a twitching crocodile corpse), that match the decaying mental state of this bad lieutenant. New Orleans is a place of harsh beauty for Herzog as he uses his usual “voodoo of location” to great effect, not to mention skilful use of his beloved man-versus-wild imagery, not just in the iguanas and crocodiles, but also from the slimy snake the slips through dirty water in the opening scene and the film’s final shot with two men dwarfed by a sinisterly tranquil aquarium.

Often, a Herzog film will become more interesting the more it drifts away from the ostensible point of the scene.  Take, for example, his wonderful Antarctic documentary Encounters at the End of the World in which he places his narration over an interview to explain how lengthy and rambling the interview became. While Port of Call New Orleans remains a luxurious wallow in low genre pleasures and a seriously cracked procedural, there are plenty of excellent moments where the camera drifts away and maybe the plot will follow it. There are plenty of welcome detours, like the aforementioned iguanas that only Cage can see, and there are lots of rich parts for character actors. Jennifer Coolidge unexpectedly turns up playing Cage’s stepmom, but there are plenty of other strange and fascinating moments with a cast of characters that includes a drug dealer (Xzibit), Cage’s coworkers (which include Val Kilmer and Michael Shannon), and a prostitute (Eva Mendes).

This is a film of debauched anecdotes and bizarre incidents, of terrible criminals and sometimes worse officials. It plays like a conventional cop film that happens to be on about as many drugs as are in its main character. Herzog charges the film with his usual intensity of specificity and Cage brings a great performance of the kind that he is capable of delivering, but many recent roles have either misused or reined in. When you have two entertainers as eccentric, engaging and unpredictable as Cage and Herzog, it’s startling, maybe even a little disappointing, to see that, though they create a strange and captivating thriller, it seems to still pull up short. These are two men who could push each other so far over the top that the film would be in free fall. They only get us to the precipice, but what a lovely, beautifully schlocky view.