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DIRECTED BY: Richard Kelly
FEATURING: Dwayne Johnson, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake, Nora Dunn, Wood Harris, Christopher Lambert, John Larroquette, Bai Ling, Jon Lovitz, Mandy Moore, Holmes Osborne, Cheri Oteri, Amy Poehler, Lou Taylor Pucci, Miranda Richardson, Zelda Rubinstein, Will Sasso, Wallace Shawn, Kevin Smith
PLOT: In the near future, a terrorist attack transforms America into a cryptofacist police state. The third anniversary of that attack proves to be a day of great significance, with the launch of a new national surveillance agency, the release of an energy source/mind-altering drug called Fluid Karma, and the debut of an enormous luxury zeppelin improbably named for the wife of Karl Marx. On this day, the fates of multiple citizens collide, including an amnesiac action star who has written a startlingly prescient screenplay, a porn actor overseeing a burgeoning branding empire, a former beauty queen-turned-spymaster, a venal fundamentalist vice-presidential candidate who is being bribed by an assortment of neo-Marxist agitants, an international cadre of cult members whose purported invention of a perpetual motion machine masks an effort to bring about the end of the world, and, maybe most importantly of all, a war veteran and his twin brother searching for each other.
BACKGROUND:
- Kelly envisioned the film as part of an epic multimedia saga. In-film titles identify sections of the movie as chapters 4-6; the first three chapters were released as graphic novels (now out-of-print collectibles).
- The film had a notorious premiere at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival when Kelly submitted the film before it was completed. He finished neither the editing nor the visual effects in time, and the extremely poor reception received by the work-in-progress prompted him to cut more than 20 minutes prior to general release (including virtually all of Janeane Garofalo’s performance as an Army general). The version shown at Cannes has since been released, although Kelly himself describes the film overall as unfinished.
- Several members of the cast are alums of “Saturday Night Live.” Kelly intentionally cast them to play up the screenplay’s satirical elements, and in general wanted to give his actors a chance to play against type.
- Budgeted at $17 million, Southland Tales grossed less than $400,000 at the global box office.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: There’s little agreement as to whether Southland Tales is a good movie or not, but the one thing that seems to be beyond dispute is that is Timberlake’s Venice Beach lip sync to The Killers’ “All These Things That I’ve Done” is the standout scene. Timberlake’s yokel narrator Pilot Abilene spends the bulk of the film drawling overheated speeches that rely heavily on the Book of Revelation, which he delivers in the tone of a pothead conspiracy nut vainly trying to lift the scales from your eyes. But here, as he struts through a rundown arcade in a drug-induced haze wearing a blood-soaked undershirt and cavorting with a kickline of PVC-clad nurses, Pilot Abilene claims the screen for himself, demonstrating more comfort with the film’s absurdities than anyone we’ve seen thus far. It’s the one moment where Kelly’s delivers his commitment to over-the-top imagery with any degree of lightness; instead of the ponderousness of significance that accompanies every other set piece, this dance scene really dances.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: Mirror on delay; rehearsing the performance-art assassination
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Richard Kelly is ambitious to a fault, a spectacularly indulgent filmmaker who never had an idea he didn’t want to film and who makes sure you notice every element of his worldbuilding. Southland Tales is a quintessential Kelly experience, with one layer of Philip K. Dickian paranoid surrealism piled upon another layer of Altmanesque interconnectedness, rinse and repeat. The film has been carefully crafted to confuse, with absurd situations, offscreen backstories, and red herrings combining to keep characters and viewers equally at sea.
Original trailer for Southland Tales (2006)
COMMENTS: What good is a blank check? If cinematic success affords a director the chance to fulfill their dream, what dream should they pursue? Go after that long green? Do what you’ve been doing, only now with more polish and flair? Or do you spend that capital on a dream project, something that allows you to reach to the furthest limits of your imagination and free yourself from the surly bonds of studio limitations and audience expectations? Such was the dilemma facing Richard Kelly following the unexpected popularity of his mindbending psychodrama Donnie Darko, and his response was a sprawling indictment of American society that blended incomprehensible legend, willfully dense storytelling, unrestrained performances, and a healthy dose of smug condescension. Faced with the choice to go big or go home, Kelly most definitely did not go home.
I doubt there’s anyone who understands all of Southland Tales, but watching it makes you confident that Kelly has absolutely thought this whole thing through. He does a laudable job of crafting a world that builds upon the aggressive fundamentalism of the Bush the Younger era, including a government determined to smother its citizens in protection, even while its leaders take advantage of all available vices. Kelly also literalizes the connection between pop culture and political power, anticipating our current incomprehensible sociopolitical moment in which a leader of unsurpassed corruption pauses his grift just long enough to cultivate his hatred for Hollywood. But there’s no pesky voice of reason to stand in opposition to all this madness. Everyone is just as crazy, either organically so or deranged by the accumulation of ongoing events. Indeed, it feels like everyone has a scheme, and accordingly, no one can be trusted, with an endless stream of lies, flip-flops, double-crosses, and heel turns that ensure you can never be certain of what the person you’re watching on screen at any given moment actually wants. The most culpable practically twirl their mustaches while cackling maniacally, while the most vulnerable walk through the film in a haze of confusion and hurt. That feeds into Kelly’s nihilistic streak, but it also distances the audience from any sort of an emotional connection or rooting interest. Rather than making you turn on a deeply flawed world for its misdeeds, you end up wishing to hasten its demise.
The choice to set the action in the greater Southland area is both Kelly’s savviest and most perverse choice. It speaks to the increasing reliance of the nation’s political class upon star quality. It probably doesn’t make sense to locate the newest security apparatus (with a headquarters populated by hipsters and little people in rain ponchos) in Venice Beach, but who knows more about studying the public’s inconsistent wants then the home of the entertainment industry? After all, in this universe performance artists are major news figures and terrorists all have headshots, and major public events feature the music of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and a gothic bilingual performance of the national anthem by Rebekah Del Rio. Aren’t those the big cultural stars, a connected Angeleno might ask?
Kelly hopes to accomplish a lot through casting. He taps into the inherent egoism of actors looking to demonstrate their command of their profession by heightening cognitive dissonance, leaning hard against type, but they are still at the mercy of his script. The characters of Southland Tales spend most of their onscreen lives in ignorance, too proud of themselves or blissfully unaware of the forces lined up against them, so even legendary improvisors like Poehler or top comic minds like Larroquette or Richardson can only do so much within their limitations. The more offbeat the casting, the stranger the outcome. (Lovitz is notably incapable of generating the menace demanded of him, and it’s fascinating that the film keeps trying to make it work.) It’s probably Johnson, in his first role sans his familiar moniker “The Rock,” who matches up best with Kelly’s brand of baroque mystery. Still a relative novice to film acting at this stage in his career, he’s got no nuance to speak of. When confident, he struts down the road with an insouciant flair that marks him as an impossibly great star, and when he’s scared or nervous, he quivers and twiddles his fingers like the dastardly villain in an Old West melodrama. He gamely goes along with everything, not bothering to wonder what it’s all supposed to mean. It’s a winning strategy. Where Gellar gets lost trying to figure out if she’s a ditz or a clever manipulator, Johnson is happy to just do as he’s told.
All this said, Southland Tales is a singular experience. It’s not as though you could identify a list of fixes that would make it “better.” The collection of outlandish situations and characters (right down to their Pynchonesque names) marks this as a true expression of Kelly’s heart. If this isn’t exactly the film he set out to make, it’s only because he didn’t have the resources to make it even bigger, to throw even more into the kitchen sink. Southland Tales authentically captures its director’s quest to be deliberately obtuse in an effort to make viewers work at figuring out his byzantine plotting, but it also exemplifies his desperate desire for them to get it, to be awed by the intricately woven complexity of the universe he has created. This unwieldy stew of a movie is, at least, everything its creator hoped it would be. Richard Kelly’s blank check may have bounced, but there’s no debating how he tried to spend it.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
IMDB LINK: Southland Tales (2006)
OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:
Goodbye, Southland, Goodbye – Kelly defends the film to The Village Voice after its Cannes flop, while he was re-editing it
Crooked Marquee: Southland Tales is the Most 2007 Movie Ever Made – Kayleigh Donaldson makes the case for the film as a visualization of how “9/11 Broke Our Brains”
Collider: Southland Tales Restrospective: Why It’s So Much Better Now – Brian Formo revisits the movie 8 years on to reassess it as a viewing experience
Comic Book Resources: The Rock’s Most Bizarre Movie Succeeded Where Megalopolis Failed – Angelo Delos Trinos throws down the gauntlet with a comparison to Francis Ford Coppola’s similarly ambitious epic
BORDERLINE WEIRD: SOUTHLAND TALES (2006) – Alice Stoehr’s original List Candidate review
SOUTHLAND TALES (2006) – THE CANNES CUT REPORT – El Rob Hubbard takes a look at athe longer edit of the film
HOME VIDEO INFO: Failing at the box office but triumphing as a cult item, Southland Tales has gone through too many physical media editions to detail separately. At the cheap end of the spectrum, bare bones DVDs of the Sony version (buy) can be obtained for only a little more than the price of a 24-hour rental. More dedicated fans will hold out for the Sony Blu-ray (buy), but true Southlanders (with extra money to spare) will skip that one and head for the Arrow edition (buy). This release includes both the cut that played in theaters and the edit that screened at Cannes. It includes almost all of the featurettes on Sony’s Blu-ray (minus a gallery of art from the graphic novel) along with a new hour-long documentary on the film. More details can be found in El Rob Hubbard’s review of the Cannes cut.
Southland Tales is also available for VOD purchase or rental, and may show up on streaming services from time to time.
Southland Tales: Cannes Cut + Theatrical Cut (2-Disc Limited Edition) [Blu-ray]
New starting from: 99.97
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