Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales may not live up to the hopes and dreams of fans who've spent years salivating over his return to film, but it sure is something else. Most specifically, it’s a mind-bending pop art parable that’s both proudly pretentious and enthusiastically juvenile. It’s a film that includes sweeping political statements about America’s increasingly intrusive safety protocols and escalating environmental crises alongside goofy stories involving precognizant porn stars and movie star messiahs. The combination is at times tedious but most often intoxicating, casting the same kind of spell as Kelly’s equally incomprehensible and similarly fascinating cult hit Donnie Darko. At some point you get so caught up in the fabric of Kelly’s creepy, silly, cryptic jumble that you stop questioning bogus dialogue such as “The fourth dimension will collapse on itself you stupid bitch!” and just ride the ride.In Kelly’s alternate near future, Texas was the target of a nuclear attack whose aftermath includes a further broadening of the Patriot Act to include a new government observation service called USIdent that specializes in tracking fingerprints and operating state border checkpoints which require Interstate Visas to pass through. With government interference at dangerous new heights, a number of radical factions emerge, the most important of which, the Neo Marxists, hatches a major scheme to use a daft porn star named Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar) to ensnare the son-in-law of the Texas senator who masterminded USIdent, action star Boxer Santaros (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) and use scandalous footage of them to coerce the senator into supporting a proposition, named in true Kelly frat humor fashion Proposition 69, that would essentially limit the ever increasing surveillance powers of USIdent. Simultaneously, other members of the same rebel group, are using Ronald Taverner (Sean William Scott), the amnesiac twin brother of an L.A. police officer, to try and publicly embarrass USIdent with a fraudulent scandal implicating Ronald’s brother Rolland (also Scott) in a double homicide motivated by racism and USIdent bred hatred. The entire staged affair is to be caught on tape by Boxer Santaros who has been convinced by Krysta to ride along with Ronald and shoot footage as research for his upcoming film, which he will direct based on what turns out to be a prophetic screenplay penned by Ms. Now. To say all of that still doesn’t come close to fully encompassing the plot of this film would be the understatement of the century. But the movie is packaged as neatly as possible with the perhaps sometimes too specific narration of Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake), an Iraq vet with a nasty scar and a knack for peddling futuristic narcotics called Fluid Karma (that also mysteriously are part of a major alternative fuel movement). The heavy-handed narration and all too lengthy exposition during the film’s first segment seem an awful lot like studio endorsed movements toward a more clearly defined picture. Southland Tales was famously booed at Cannes, cut down by nearly a half hour, and made more “understandable” to audiences. Probably a lot of its mysteries would add up nicer had the full amount of footage been used. As it stands, this is a movie begging for a director’s cut and I suspect it will get one in the modern age of re-released and re-re-released DVD sets.
Kelly's admirably ambitious Southland Tales is not nearly the complete disaster critics claimed it was at Cannes but it’s also not the career solidifying masterpiece Kelly fans have been waiting for. It doesn’t crystallize the pseudo-religious, pop culture satire meets apocalyptic sci-fi style he originated with Donnie Darko, it actually makes it much murkier and more complicated. So many of Darko’s themes resurface here in more obvious, less sophisticated styles that it’s hard not to see Kelly as the sort of director who may be eternally obsessed with the same eternal questions. Even in the face of crass, sometimes mood killing humor and a plot so ludicrous it’s hard to even describe with a straight face, Kelly still manages to toy with these nagging questions in a beautiful, haunting fashion. He’s a gifted director. There’s no question about that. And the greatest tragedy of Southland Tales’ long road to the big screen and critical drubbing (which I personally disagree with fully) is that it’s almost guaranteed he’ll leave behind the ponderous indie head scratchers for a long time to come (he’s already set to direct the more mainstream thriller The Box with Cameron Diaz at the lead). Ultimately Southland Tales really does deliver what it promises: a wild journey into the self-obsessed, absurdity of Hollywood and the pressing dangers of modern America, and with a wild sense of humor to boot. There may sometimes be a little bit of sourness over the herky jerky rhythms of its complex tone or a simple cringe or two at some of the loopier dialogue, but all in all it really worked on me. It will not be remembered as the best film of the year, but it may be considered the most original. More importantly, it has a gift, like Donnie Darko, for occupying your brain and leading you down all kinds of roads of thought you’d never expect to encounter. For anyone with no patience for kitsch or outlandishly surreal sci-fi this is not a journey worth taking. Anyone seeking a new experience, a Donnie Darko-esque voyage into a mysterious world of sex, death, and apocalyptic zeppelins, there is no better film to see this year.
Grade: A-
