366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
DIRECTED BY: Nicolas Roeg
FEATURING: Theresa Russell, Gary Oldman, Christopher Lloyd, Sandra Bernhard, Colleen Camp
PLOT: Linda leads a boring existence in a small southern town, taken for granted by her model-railroad aficionado husband; she is roused from her stupor by the arrival of Martin, a volatile young Englishman who claims to be the child she gave up for adoption at birth.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: If Track 29 were only about the taboo subjects at its heart – sexual assault, incest, adoption, infidelity – it might get our attention for that audacity. But those touchy subjects pale in comparison to the outlandish manner in which these characters behave, seemingly immune to any rational expectations of behavior. For what could have been (and once was) an intimate drama, it’s a lot.
COMMENTS: The pairing of a screenwriter with a message and a director with vision is a risky thing. Two strong points of view can sometimes coalesce, but they can just as easily result in conflict and confusion. Usually, one of those voices has to dominate the other. Now, I’m not 100% certain what happened when a Dennis Potter screenplay wound up in the hands of Nicolas Roeg, but I’m willing to hazard a guess: Roeg won.
Potter’s script is based upon his BBC teleplay “Schmoedipus,” and it’s instructive to watch both because you can see where expanding the material has taken it from a comparatively sedate affair to become hyperactive and exceedingly peculiar. Much of Potter’s dialogue makes the transition intact, but the whole tone of the piece changes significantly. Opening up the setting from a cramped suburban London rowhouse to a sun-kissed beach community in the Outer Banks changes the stakes, as does the creation of a more violent backstory for the child’s conception and the introduction of railroads as an unexpectedly prominent theme. (The title is a reference to the lyrical location of the Chattanooga Choo Choo.) The characters themselves have undergone an enormous transformation. The middle-aged Elizabeth becomes Russell’s youthful, childish Linda; her husband’s tedious office job becomes Lloyd’s doctor with a toy train fixation, and the quietly seductive stranger played by Tim Curry on television is a wholly different animal as embodied by Oldman, fresh off his portrayal of Sid Vicious and primed to play the angriest of young men.
Oldman is fully schizoid, turning on a dime from deranged madman to bereft toddler. (There is no reason for his character to be British, except that it reverses Potter’s gambit in the teleplay, where the young mother’s child has been shipped off to Canada.) His unpredictability is magnetic, as he lures Linda in with sweetness and just as quickly turns antagonistic. Amazingly, though, Oldman shares the wackiest scene in the film with Lloyd’s appearance at a model train convention that unexpectedly turns into a rabble-rousing political rally. As Lloyd becomes more histrionic on behalf of (double-checks notes) toy railroading, the crowd gets increasingly amped up. This is intercut with Oldman’s full-blown assault on Lloyd’s personal track set, a bewildering juxtaposition as the toy locomotives explode with all the flash and gusto of a Hal Needham film, and one train car even spurts pints of blood as it is squashed underneath Oldman’s foot. The semi-truck that comes barreling through Russell’s bedroom to cap off the scene is merely the cherry on a very nutty sundae.
It’s easy to lose track of Linda, ostensibly the central character, amidst the chaos that surrounds her. Russell’s portrayal is ridiculous, with an accent that sounds like a parody of a Southern drawl and delivered in the cadence of a 12-year old, and Roeg confuses matters by styling her as a mall girl. She looks about the same age as she does in the flashbacks to her assault at a carnival, but little things – the lilt in her voice, her petulance at her husband’s absence, the fact that she still wears braces – point to an immaturity that she has never outgrown. The reason for this is the heart of Track 29’s twist: Martin is almost certainly a figment of Linda’s imagination, an embodiment of the confused trauma she feels over her rape as a teenager, the subsequent loss of her child through adoption, her arrested emotional development, and her sexless, infantilizing marriage. If you’re paying attention, the truth is hinted at in the opening seconds of the film as Martin makes a Tyler Durden-style entrance. The thing is, the film gives up the game halfway through, in a scene where a bartender literally informs us, “That woman is over there talking to nobody, like a crazy person.”
There are other hints that the more melodramatic elements are part of the fantasy world embodied by her returned child: Repeated film and TV cues that reflect or amplify her mood (the dramatic climax is scored to an extended selection of clips from the 1962 Cape Fear). As Martin plays the piano, he is quickly joined by an echoing chorus and a full orchestra. And dialogue like “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this world, it’s that women and trains don’t mix!” is laughably on the nose. Essentially, it all has to be ludicrously over the top, because this is the moment when Linda has to grow up and leave all the craziness behind.
The film’s denouement suggests that Linda has grown up in some ways, but remains hopelessly damaged in others. Plotwise, this is another contrast with Potter’s original production, but it remains true in another important respect: we tell some lies to get through a moment, and others to get through the rest of our lives. In Roeg’s take on the material, everything we see could be a lie, and the heroine is too broken to ever even know.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by Pearl Slaghoople. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
