Film Notes: Southland Tales

Finally released on DVD after years of tweaking and an embarrassingly minor theatrical run, Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales is the story of a dimwitted porn star, an amnesiac conservative actor, an alternative energy baron, the head of a national surveillance agency, an ice-cream truck-driving arms dealer, bong-huffing neo-Marxist extortionists, a soldier slinging a drug called Liquid Karma and two suspiciously identical policemen, among many others. An attempted summary of the film’s story would turn into a list twice as long, as full of tangents and half-baked notions as genuine plot points. Southland Tales is a movie of Ideas, and its makers want you to know that. It’s cerebral, but also deadly silly and stupid.

More than anything, though, the key descriptor for Kelly’s follow-up to his much-loved, much-puzzled-over Donnie Darko is audacity. For the first 20 minutes, it’s hard to shake the feeling the whole thing’s just a big joke, as a scarred-up Iraq war veteran (Justin Timberlake) introduces us to a present-day, post-apocalypse California, our primary players and leagues of paranoiac back-story set to a series of glossy, over-designed effects. Considering Kelly cut 40 minutes out of the film following a positively disastrous Cannes screening, it’s hard to begrudge him the unfortunate Band-Aid of awkward exposition, but the scope of what he introduces, the obviously non-chewable bites he takes right off the bat, still leave you primed for the biggest cinematic goof since Freddy Got Fingered. (Or, at the very least, Lady In The Water… that one was a joke, right?) And for an hour afterward, it just plods forward without particular drive or interest.

Then a funny thing happens: Everything starts falling together. Not in the way Kelly probably envisioned as this bloated clown originally emerged from his word processor, but falling together nonetheless. Throughout Southland Tales, the story pretends pathetically to the thrones of Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Altman and Philip K Dick, but when it’s honest with itself, there’s really quite a lot to be said for the film as a sort of slick, maximalist heir to Repo Man. It’s a shaggy-dog story, full of metaphysical lunacy and infuriatingly dense storytelling, with none of the patient, melancholy character work that makes Donnie Darko so beguiling. But whether it deserves it, Southland Tales redeems itself in small ways amid the mess and ends up working unexpectedly well on its own terms, which is all you can really ask. It’s not hard to see why so many have tossed Southland Tales aside as a disaster, but the curious shouldn’t be dissuaded.