There is something to be said for the boldness required to make a movie like "Southland Tales," which was in production for over six years and certainly demonstrates the effort behind it. Unfortunately, the end result is a disjointed, frenetic mess, one that is almost spellbindingly perplexing in its refusal to act like a cohesive movie. The question is whether or not all that boldness is worth anything when said epically long film is booed and walked out on at Sundance and universally panned.
There is sure to be a devoted group of cult-like Richard Kelly fans thanks to his 2001 "Donnie Darko," who will vehemently disagree with this sentiment. But when a movie is so long that it divides itself into parts - and starts with Part IV - the line between eccentric cult fodder and pure sickening lunacy gets extremely hazy.
"Southland Tales" takes place in Los Angeles in 2008. Due to a bunch of catastrophic events, most notably a nuclear terrorist attack in Texas in 2005, the United States of 2008 is very different from the one today - that involves lots of B- and C-list celebrities playing characters who have taken up the mantle of saving the country from environmental and sociological disasters.
It's difficult to boil the world of the movie down into a few sentences, but it's basically a police state. What's most important is that the L.A.P.D. is corrupt and brutal, beautiful blonde women are worshipped for their sexuality and barons of the energy business command an alarming amount of power.
It's a lot like today's world, with the most notable exception being that the costumes in "Southland Tales" are hideously outrageous takes on future chic and unflinchingly oblivious to the fact that they're painful to view. Imagine Orwell's "1984" meets a Flock of Seagulls music video and you're on your way.
This film reeks of another futuristic dystopia sophomore slump by an auteur: Mike Judge's "Idiocracy" (2006). Both films imagine a country that is deteriorating. There seems to be a pretty clear consensus among artists of this century concerning the worsening of the United States' overall conditions. Whereas "Idiocracy" envisions a decline into mediocrity, "Southland Tales" sees full-on disaster, something fans of "Donnie Darko" might have expected.
What's frustrating is that while "Donnie Darko" was challenging to understand, though ultimately rewarding, "Southland Tales" is an all-out assault on a viewer's capacity for comprehension.
There are a number of storylines to follow, the most prominent being that of Dwayne Johnson's character. Johnson plays Boxer Santaros, a famous actor who, with the help of porn star girlfriend, Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), writes a screenplay he hopes to produce and star in. Things get muddled though, as his screenplay revolves around a character who also exists in the reality of "Southland Tales." The events in the movie begin to reflect the events in Johnson's character's screenplay, and as things progress, the whole situation becomes more and more indecipherable, instead of eventually reaching some kind of satisfying resolution.
There's plenty more going on in the background as well, including a sinister plot of some kind hatched by an eccentric German energy magnate, Baron Von Westphalen (played by Wallace Shawn), a senator named Bobby Frost (Holmes Osbourne) - one of the film's many transparent and senseless references to the poet Robert Frost - and occasional narration from Justin Timberlake delivered in remarkably cheesy fashion.
The movie's ensemble cast features numerous names audiences know and remember, including Sarah Michelle Gellar, Mandy Moore, Kevin Smith, if only for a moment, and SNL alums Cheri Oteri, Amy Poehler and John Lovitz.
The trouble with "Southland Tales" isn't solely its overcrowded and needlessly fractured mode of storytelling, but the utter sincerity with which the movie as a whole is presented. Everything about the movie including the dialogue, story and characters, feels like a parody science fiction movie ? la "Spaceballs" (1987).
If the movie were an hour shorter and featured more slapstick it might make enjoyable comedy, but one can only assume that Kelly made the film in an attempt to, at least on some level, convey a serious message and tell a compelling story. Instead, however, he's delivered a rambling two-and-a-half hour long mess that looks and sounds cheap and amateurish despite being a sophomore effort and featuring a cast full of people who were all kind-of famous sometime between six and 30 years ago.
