Lost Highway

After the critical and commercial beating David Lynch took with Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), his next film Lost Highway (1997) was seen as a comeback after a dry spell of five years. At the time, there was certainly a strong push in appealing to a young, hip audience with a splashy cover story in Rolling Stone magazine (Lynch even shared the cover with Trent Reznor) that drew attention to the film’s soundtrack featuring then popular musicians Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, and The Smashing Pumpkins. However, this did little for the film’s potential mainstream appeal as Lynch delivered another nightmarish neo-noir tale of jealousy and murder that may or may not be taking place inside the mind of a killer. In some respects, the film anticipated Lynch’s later masterpiece Mulholland Drive (2001), it too is a mystery that appears to take place within the fevered imagination of its protagonist.


Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) is a musician whose wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) may be cheating on him. We’re not really sure and neither is he. One day, a videotape shows up on the steps of their front door in a plain brown envelope. When they watch it there is grainy camcorder footage of the outside of their house. They don’t think too much of it but another tape arrives and this time there is footage of the inside of their house and, most chillingly, of them asleep in bed. There is definitely some tension in their relationship judging from all the pregnant pauses in what little conversations they have. Or it could be Fred’s inability to perform adequately in bed, which she responds to with a condescending pat on the back and a, “It’s okay.”

Two police detectives investigate and in typically amusing Lynchian fashion are useless. Their ineffectual nature anticipates the equally useless cops in Mulholland Drive. Fred and Renee attend a party at Andy’s (Michael Massee), a friend of hers and someone Fred saw leaving with his wife one night while he was performing at a nightclub. At the party, Fred encounters a mysterious man (Robert Blake) dressed all in black and with Kabuki white makeup on his face. He walks right up to Fred and asks, “We’ve met before, haven’t we?” Fred doesn’t recognize him but the man says that they met at the Madison’s house and, most disturbingly, he’s there right now. Of course, Fred doesn’t believe him until the man calls his house and he responds. Fred is understandably unnerved after this creepy conversation.

He and Renee return home to find no one else there but we see a light moving fast through the upper floor of their place. The first half of Lost Highway is an unsettling slow burn of uncomfortable silences and a feeling of paranoia and dread in the Madison house. Fred often disappears into darkened hallways that almost feel like the recesses of his mind. Lynch accomplishes this through very little light and a subtly disturbing soundscape of atmospheric noises. The last videotape that arrives features Fred next to the badly mutilated dead body of Renee and before he knows it he’s on death row for her murder. This is where things get really strange as at some point Fred transforms into a young man named Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty). The authorities are understandably mystified and let Pete go.

He goes back to living with his parents, going out with his girlfriend Sheila (Natasha Gregson Wagner), and working at a local auto shop. On the surface, Pete is the opposite of Fred – he’s young and virile, having sex with not only his girlfriend, but a beautiful blond woman named Alice (Arquette again). He’s also friends with local mobster Mr. Eddy (a ferocious Robert Loggia), an intimidating guy who loves his car (“This is where mechanical excellence and one thousand horsepower pays off!”) and does not tolerate people who tailgate. However, Pete also gets involved with Alice who just happens to be Eddy’s girlfriend. Over time, Fred’s world slowly seeps into Pete’s. For example, Fred’s gonzo saxophone solo from the first half of the film plays over a radio as Pete works on a car and it gives him a headache.

The first and last line spoken in Lost Highway is "Dick Laurent is dead." Initially, it seems no more important a line than a simple teaser to draw us gradually into a dark, atmospheric world. However, much like the severed ear found lying in a field in Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986), this phrase is the key to unlocking a mystery that lies at the heart of Lost Highway. The mystery that is central to this film seems to be a conventional one — nothing more than a man accused of killing his wife. This is only a superficial reading, however. Look a little deeper and it becomes apparent that Lynch has swathed this mystery up in layers of abstractions and contradictions that makes watching Lost Highway akin to solving a riddle. Another key line that I believe is crucial to understanding what happens to Fred is when he tells the cops, “I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.” So, the second half of Lost Highway could simply be him remembering things his own way.

While on death row, Fred tries to escape his fate by creating a fantasy world where he’s everything he’s not – a stylish neo-noir filled with dangerous gangsters and sexy women but this is only a temporary reprieve as the problems that he had bleed into his fantasy world. Like Fred, Pete wanders the darkened places in his home. He is Fred’s idealized image: young, strong and virile. He even has control over Renee’s doppelganger, Alice but this is fleeting and she once again exerts her dominance, this time as a dangerous femme fatale. She ropes Pete in on a dodgy job of robbing an associate of Mr. Eddy’s and predictably it goes bad but with a Lynchian spin where even his characters die in weird ways (it involves furniture). The sequence evolves into a surrealist nightmare. More importantly, this scene is where Fred and Pete’s worlds bleed together and it becomes obvious that Fred isn’t going to escape his fate.

This culminates in a scene where Alice and Pete make love in the desert while waiting for the man who will fence their stolen goods. It is one of the most beautiful and chilling moments in any Lynch film. He lights their naked bodies to the headlights of a car while the hypnotic “Song to the Siren” by This Mortal Coil plays over the soundtrack. Lynch then turns this beautiful moment on its head when Pete passionate tells Alice over and over, “I want you,” to which she replies by whispering in his ear, “You’ll never have me.” She walks off and once again Fred has failed to control the object of his affection and frustration, even in his own created fantasy world. It is inevitable that these two worlds collide because Fred is consumed by the guilt of what he’s done. Ultimately, he is unable to escape his true nature as symbolized by the film’s rather abstract climax.

From the powerful shot of a car speeding down a darkened, deserted stretch of highway at night that begins and ends the film, Lost Highway contains many stunning visuals (courtesy of cinematographer Peter Deming) that will haunt you long after seeing the film. For example, the use of light, or rather, lack of it adds to the mysterious atmosphere that envelopes the film. Characters disappear down darkened hallways only to reappear later on. Many of the scenes in the film are lit in such a way that they almost resemble a painting that you could reach out and touch. There’s also the fantastic introduction of Alice captured in slow motion as Pete sees her climb out of Eddy’s convertible to Lou Reed’s cover of “This Magic Moment” and we can see why Pete is immediately attracted to her.

Lynch's films are also known for their rather complex soundscapes. In one way or another, the director has always taken a personal approach to the use of sound in his work and how it matches with the images on the screen. Lost Highway is no exception and may well be the best use of sound in his films since Eraserhead (1977). The film's soundscape quite often layers sound upon sound with incredible effect. It may only be the use of minimal sound effects buried in the background to suggest a feeling of ominous foreboding in a scene or a piece of music brought to the foreground, threatening to overwhelm everything else. And for the music Lynch not only continued to work with his longtime collaborator, Angelo Badalamenti, but also enlisted the help of Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and British musician Barry Adamson. Together, they take Lost Highway to new levels of menace that the filmmaker was never able to achieve before. Their contributions greatly enhance the film's already impressive soundtrack.

The origins for Lost Highway started with something strange that happened to Lynch. A stranger rang the director’s doorbell, pushed the button of the intercom and told him, “Dick Laurent is dead.” When Lynch walked to the window and looked out he didn’t see anybody. This understandably troubled him for some time. On the last night of filming the Twin Peaks movie, he had a brief vision that would become roughly the first third of his next project: “It was like the first third of the picture maybe, minus some scenes we had in the final script ...This thing I had went all the way up to the fist hitting Fred in the police station – to suddenly being in another place and not knowing how he got there or what is wrong.” A few years later, Lynch read Barry Gifford’s story Night People and at the end of the first chapter two characters talk about a lost highway. Lynch loved those words and contacted Gifford who suggested they write something together.

A year later, the two men sat down and began to exchange ideas they had for the film. Both men had their own notions of what the film should be and these differed quite radically – to the point where they rejected each other's ideas and eventually their own. "Then I told Barry about this series of things that came to me one night. The very last night of shooting Fire Walk With Me these things shot into my head. I was driving home with Mary Sweeney and I told her about them. What I told her sort of scared her and it sort of scared me too. And when I told them to Barry he said, 'Jeez, I really like that,' and that was the start of a brand-new direction.” Gifford and Lynch decided that at some point in the story a transformation should occur and it would result in another story but have connections with the first one. Within a month, they had written the screenplay.

Lynch always wanted to work with Bill Pullman and so when it came to casting the role of Fred Madison, he was the first actor he thought of to play the role. The director felt that Pullman had a “pretty intense side to him which wasn’t exploited in his previous roles.” Furthermore, Lynch saw in the actor’s eyes, “intelligence and a vein of madness inside them. And to force it to come out I pushed during rehearsals.” Another significant bit of casting was Robert Blake (In Cold Blood) as the Mystery Man, the creepy figure who may be a part of Fred’s imagination. The veteran actor was responsible for the look and style of the character. One day, he decided to cut his hair short, part it in the middle and apply Kabuki white make-up on his face. "And the makeup people said, 'You're going crazy, man! Nobody in this movie looks like that; everybody looks regular!' I said, 'Leave me alone; just give me some shit.' I put this black outfit on. I walked up to David, and he said, 'Wonderful!' and turned around and walked away." Blake clearly knew what he was doing as his character exudes a sinister vibe every time he appears on screen.

The first cut of Lost Highway ran just over two-and-a-half hours. After a screening with fifty people, Lynch cut out 25 minutes of footage. Not surprisingly it received mixed to negative reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave it two out of four stars and wrote, “I have nothing against movies of mystery, deception and puzzlement. It's just that I'd like to think the director has an idea, a purpose, and an overview, beyond the arbitrary manipulation of plot elements. He knows how to put effective images on the screen, and how to use a soundtrack to create mood, but at the end of the film, our hand closes on empty air.” In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, “More in its imagery than in its baroque plotting, Lost Highway is best at creating a sense of unease. Working with cinematographer Peter Deming and longtime composing collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, Lynch has put together some thoroughly spooky situations. In the hands of this crew, even something as straightforward as a ringing phone in an empty room can create the feeling that the most awful thing is about to happen.” The Washington Post’s Desson Howe wrote, “Highway, which Lynch has pretentiously dubbed ‘a 21st-century noir horror film,’ is nothing more than a 20th-century cul-de-sac. The maker of such great works as Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks has finally run out of road.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B-“ rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “By the time the film reaches its heart of darkness (it has something to do with a porno movie), Lynch, for the first time, seems to be using avant-garde tricks to pass off as 'taboo' what looks to the naked eye like mere routine sleaze. Lost Highway has scattered moments of Lynch's poetry, but the film's ultimate shock is that it isn't shocking at all.” Long-time Lynch supporter Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, “Despite the shopworn noir imagery and teenage notions of sex, this beautifully structured (if rigorously nonhumanist) explosion of expressionist effects has a psychological coherence that goes well beyond logical story lines, and Lynch turns it into an exhilarating roller-coaster ride.” Finally, in her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “A structure that begins and ends at the same moment in time, with a debt to the Mobius strip (or to Pulp Fiction), is another intriguing feature. But the film has more of these touches than it has explanations. Eventually it raises the overwhelming possibility that nobody is entirely in the driver's seat.” Most interesting, Lynch took Siskel and Ebert’s thumbs down verdict as a badge of honor and plastered it large on newspaper ads for his film.

So what is Lynch and Gifford’s take on what the film means? The director said in an interview, “It’s Fred’s story. It’s not a dream. It’s realistic, though according to Fred’s logic.” During filming, Deborah Wuliger, the unit publicist, came upon the idea of a psychogenic fugue, which Lynch and Gifford subsequently incorporated into the film. "The person suffering from it creates in their mind a completely new identity, new friends, new home, new everything – they forget their past identity,” Lynch said." In addition to being a mental condition, he also discovered that a fugue was also a musical term. "A fugue starts off one way, takes up on another direction, and then comes back to the original, so it [relates] to the form of the film.” Gifford took the idea of a psychogenic fugue and ran with it. "This was something I researched with a clinical psychologist at Stanford, so we had some basis in fact here. After we found that freedom, more or less it was just a matter of creating this surreal, fantastic world that Fred Madison lives in when he becomes Peter Dayton."

Ultimately, what makes Lost Highway so good are the risks Lynch takes. After the crushing commercial and critical defeat of Fire Walk with Me, one would think that he would have take the safe route and made a conventional film. No way. As he did with Blue Velvet, Lynch decided to follow his muse and make a film on his own terms. Lost Highway is easily Lynch's darkest, bleakest film since Eraserhead. There are no happy endings in this film. No one escapes into radiator heaven. Characters that stray onto the lost highway simply stay lost with no chance of escape. While watching this film, you must be prepared to think as Lynch constantly questions how you perceive things — both people and events. What is real and what isn't? He also plays around with the notion of déjà vu by not only repeating images but also dialogue which forces you to pay close attention to what is going on. Lost Highway really is a film that you have to see more than once just to get all the little details that you missed the first time around.

Clay Pigeons

When Clay Pigeons came out in 1998, it was riding the tail end of the neo-noir boom of the 1990’s and was generally regarded as being derivative of the films of Quentin Tarantino and especially the Coen brothers with its quirky characters enmeshed in a neo-noirish story punctuated by sudden, jarring violence. To be fair, director David Dobkin admitted in interviews that he drew inspiration from Fargo (1996). Produced by filmmaker siblings Tony and Ridley Scott, Clay Pigeons featured then up-and-coming actors Joaquin Phoenix and Vince Vaughn with 1990’s mainstay Janeane Garofalo who all breathe life into their colorful characters created by first time screenwriter Matt Healy. The result is a playful noir with unexpected tonal shifts that keeps things interesting.


The film opens with a beautiful shot of a big blue Montana sky decorated with white fluffy clouds right out of an early Gus Van Sant film, which makes sense as Eric Alan Edwards, who shot several of his early works, was the cinematographer on this one. Clay Bidwell (Joaquin Phoenix) and his buddy are out shooting guns one sunny afternoon when he confronts Clay about sleeping with his wife Amanda (Georgina Cates). However, instead of killing Clay, he shoots and kills himself and with that Clay Pigeons kicks into the opening credits while the insanely catchy song, “Timebomb” by the alternative country band Old 97’s blasts over the soundtrack.

Freaked out that he will get blamed for his friend’s death (he certainly has motive), Clay tells Amanda what happened but the amoral femme fatale wants to continue their illicit affair. So, Clay decides to stage his friend’s death as a vehicular accident caused by alcohol. Wise old Sheriff Dan Mooney (Scott Wilson) seems to buy it and Clay seems to be in the clear except for Amanda who doesn’t get the hint when he tells her that it’s over between them. To further complicate things, a tall drink of water by the name of Lester Long (Vince Vaughn) enters his life. He’s a chatty, gregarious guy who dresses like a cowboy and may be a serial killer. Pretty soon the bodies start piling up, which leads Mooney to deadpan to Clay at one point, “Promise you’ll stop finding dead people.”

Hot off his scene-stealing role in Swingers (1996), Vince Vaughn is excellent as one of the most genial killers in cinema. There are the little details about his character that make him so memorable, like the cotton stuffed in one ear (to stop the occasional bleeding) or how he breaks off the filters on his cigarettes or the annoying little psychotic laugh he lets out once in awhile. Lester is happy-go-lucky to the point of insanity but he doesn’t think he’s crazy. Yet for all of his charm, Vaughn occasionally hints at Lester’s darker more homicidal impulses until his eventual meltdown. This was the actor at the top of his game. At that point in his career all of his acting tics and affectations were still fresh and funny. This is easily his darkest role as he digs into an angry side in a way that he has only offered glimpses of in subsequent films. What happened to Vaughn? Much like director David Dobkin, he’s chosen to play it safe with formulaic comedies.

Joaquin Phoenix has the unenviable task of playing the basically decent guy who is in way over his head. Clay isn’t nearly as colorful a character as Lester or Amanda but he does enough to make us empathize with his plight and root for him to get clear of the mess he has gotten himself in. Against these larger than life personas, Phoenix wisely underplays his role in a nicely understated performance coupled with his trademark simmering intensity.

With her tangled web of hair and pushy attitude, Amanda is one of the more grating femme fatales in the neo-noir genre. Georgina Cates plays it to the hilt complete with the forceful way she takes a drag on a cigarette and the annoying way she speaks. The first few times I watched this film she really bugged the hell out of me and then I realized that this was done on purpose and that, like Clay, you almost want her to meet a nasty demise if only to remove her irritating presence from the film but then you feel guilty about it afterwards because of its rather grisly nature.

The film’s secret weapon, acting-wise, is veteran character actors Scott Wilson’s portrayal of Sheriff Mooney. Initially, he seems to be the stereotypical slow-thinking backwater lawman who is clearly out of his depth but over the course of the film Wilson gradually provides hints that there is much more to this character and that everyone else is underestimating him, which makes the final payoff, when we realize that Mooney is actually the smartest character in the film, that much more satisfying.

Dobkin certainly knows how to establish atmosphere for a given scene, like the fog-enshrouded midnight rendezvous between Clay and Lester. Cinematographer Eric Alan Edwards does a fantastic job giving Clay Pigeons a memorable look, from the golden orange of the rocks in the mountainous landscape to the cobalt blue skies decorated with wispy white clouds animated via time lapse photography that are inserted throughout the film. Dobkin captures the Montana town where the film takes place in a way that also evokes David Lynch by immersing us in small-town Americana that is both fascinating and a bit kitschy with a smattering of warped humor. In addition, the two FBI agents that come to investigate the multiple murders could easily rub elbows with Twin Peaks’ Agent Cooper. They are all business but with their own off-hour quirks – she (Janeane Garofalo) likes to get high while watching Alien (1979) while he (Phil Morris) looks at crime photographs while watching reruns of Lassie.

The jaunty musical cues contrast the often dark imagery, like when Clay dumps a body in a nearby lake to the strains of “Di-Gue-Ding-Ding” by Michel Legrand. In another scene, “It’s Now or Never” by Elvis Presley plays during the build up to another vicious murder. On a more poetic note, “Moon Over Montana" by Jimmy Wakely plays over an establishing shot of a full moon at night, striking just the right tone to what happens next. All of these cues are held together by John Lurie’s Ry Cooder-esque score.

Dobkin worked extensively on the screenplay with Matt Healy before sending it out to any actors in order “to make sure the basics were as perfectly tooled as possible.” When Joaquin Phoenix first read the script he thought, “Wow, this could be really tough – in the wrong hands, it could just become preposterous.” He met with Dobkin, they hit it off and the actor agreed to do the film. Initially, Vince Vaughn was turned off by the character of Lester Long: “I thought, this is kind of sick. Not really my taste. Lester’s almost a demonic character, this dark force. But to play it for comedy … I thought, this could be cool.” His agent didn’t want him to do Clay Pigeons and instead go after high profile films after appearing in The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997). However, Vaughn was drawn to the script and working with a first-time director like he had done on Swingers.

Clay Pigeons received mixed notices from critics. In his review for The New York Times, Stephen Holden praised the performances of Vaughn and Phoenix: “This results in a film that delights by confounding expectations. Mr. Vaughn's Lester is part shambling charmer, part lunatic, and you're never sure when he's suddenly going to erupt into a monster. Mr. Phoenix's Clay is a not-so-dumb country bumpkin whose saving grace is a stubborn, almost shining integrity.” The Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan found the film to be “smartly written and stylishly directed.” In his review for the Washington Post, Michael O’Sullivan wrote, “Clay Pigeons is a very odd – and actually rather funny – comedy. Not laugh-out-loud, ha-ha funny so much as smile-on-the-inside, weird funny.”

However, Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, “Director David Dobkin and writer Matthew Healy find the right tone and many individual moments spring alive, but I think they go around the track a couple of extra times.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “D” rating and wrote, “every scene is powered by a cut from a soundtrack available in a CD bin near you. In other words, it's young-Hollywood-driven business as usual in this derivative, nasty, and ultimately empty drama.”

Clay Pigeons has the off-kilter rhythm of a Coen brothers film as Clay gradually paints himself into a corner thanks to several bad decisions so that he has to figure a way out if he can. The film was an auspicious directorial debut for Dobkin who got his start in music videos and commercials. Unfortunately, the commercial and critical failure of this film saw him move on to broad comedies like Shanghai Knights (2003) and Wedding Crashers (2005). Looking back, Clay Pigeons seems like a freakish anomaly in the man’s career as he has played it safe ever since. It has the freshness of a first film and of a filmmaker willing to go for it with style, snappy dialogue and a fantastic cast of character actors.

 

Hollywoodland

On June 16, 1959, actor George Reeves died from a gunshot wound to the head. His death was ruled a suicide with the official police report stating that he had been depressed over his failed career. Reeves’ claim to fame had been portraying Superman on television during the 1950’s. It was a very popular show but by the time he turned 40, the actor wanted to move on with his career. However, he could not shake his association with the iconic role. His mother Helen Bessolo refused to believe her son took his own life and hired private investigator Jerry Geisler. Both died before they could prove anything.


Over the years, more and more people refused to believe that Reeves would commit suicide. Forensic evidence surfaced that cast doubts on the official cause of death. Was he killed by his fiancée Lenore Lemmon, or was he murdered by order of Toni Mannix, the wife of MGM general manager Eddie Mannix who allegedly had Mob connections? Reeves had an affair with Toni but spurned her for another woman. Or, did Eddie find out and have Reeves killed?

Hollywoodland (2006) dramatizes Reeves’ suspicious death and documents the events leading up to it. The film is structured as a detective story with a private detective investigating Reeves’ death. The film was seen as a comeback of sorts for Ben Affleck who hadn’t acted for two years after the critical and commercial flops of Gigli (2006) and Jersey Girl (2006). After headlining several high profile studio films, he had wisely laid-low and took a supporting role in this film. Affleck portrayed Reeves to critical acclaim and hasn’t looked back since.

Louis Simo (Adrien Brody) is a low-rent Jack Gittes-type private investigator that specializes in cases of infidelity. His “office” is a fleabag motel as all of his money goes to an ex-wife (Molly Parker) and young son (Zach Mills). He used to be a police detective and his ex-partner turns him onto the Reeves (Ben Affleck) case. Perhaps influenced by his son’s upset reaction over the death of his T.V. idol, Simo decides to talk to Reeves’ mother (Lois Smith) who believes that her son did not commit suicide. He investigates further, interviewing people that knew him and this triggers a series of flashbacks to the events leading up to Reeves’ death.

The flashbacks give us more insight into Reeves. For example, while trying to be seen at a swanky Hollywood hangout, he meets Toni Mannix (Diane Lane), a beautiful woman married to a very powerful man, Eddie Mannix (Bob Hoskins). Initially unaware that she’s married and to whom, Reeves has an affair with Toni – partly because he’s attracted to her and partly because he thinks she can help his career. Toni becomes his sugar mama, buying him a nice house in the suburbs for him and their trysts.

The scenes between Ben Affleck and Diane Lane are quite good. They have decent chemistry and do a good job of conveying what their characters got out of the relationship. Affleck is excellent in this meaty supporting role. The rise and fall of Reeves must’ve spoke volumes to the actor who had also experienced both. Affleck knew what it felt like to be on the top of the world one moment and then considered a joke after a couple of high profile flops. Anyone who is a student of Hollywood lore knows that it has a long history of tragic deaths. What makes Reeves’ story so interesting is that he played such a wholesome, upstanding character with Superman but had an unhappy personal life. Affleck fleshes out Reeves and digs deep, providing a nicely layered portrayal of the man. Reeves just wanted to be regarded as a serious actor but did such a good job playing Superman that he couldn’t disassociate himself from the role.

Adrien Brody delivers a decent enough performance but his invented character feels like just that and seems out of sorts with all the actual historical figures he interacts with and investigates. Simo’s backstory and motivation is just not as compelling as say Jack Gittes in Chinatown (1974), a film whose legacy casts a long shadow over Hollywoodland. Brody is supposed to be a jaded investigator who thinks he’s seen it all but the actor comes off as a little too aloof. As a result, his character feels like a tacked on afterthought.

Diane Lane doesn’t have a lot of screen time but she makes the most of it. Toni is a powerful woman who gets what she wants and Lane plays her as a charming individual so long as Reeves makes her happy. It’s when he no longer does this that her true nature reveals itself. Watching the actress in this film makes me wonder how she would have done in L.A. Confidential (1997) if she had been cast in Kim Basinger’s role. In some respects, Toni is not a typical femme fatale and Lane does her best to flesh out her character and shed some light on her motivations.

Producer Glenn Williamson, at the time head of production at USA Films, bought Paul Bernbaum’s screenplay, Truth, Justice and the American Way in 2001. Williamson was drawn to the way the script “guides the audience toward a conclusion, but there is no definitive answer.” The project moved to Miramax Films for a short time with filmmakers Mark and Michael Polish (Twin Falls Idaho) attached to direct. At one point, they screen-tested Kyle MacLachlan to play George Reeves. Williamson wanted the film to have a more mainstream appeal – something that the directors, known for their dark, atmospheric films, weren’t interested in and so they decided part ways.

The project moved to Focus Features where veteran T.V. director Allen Coulter signed on. When his agent gave him Bernbaum’s script he wanted to do it after reading the first five pages. The director was drawn to the “great Hollywood noir milieu” and the complexity of Reeves’ life. He heard that Ben Affleck was interested in the role and ended up casting him as Reeves. To resemble the actor, Affleck put on upwards of 28 lbs., changed the shape of his nose with a prosthetic, altered his hairline, and changed the color of his eyes. If that wasn’t enough, during filming, he listened to several clips of Reeves’ voice between takes and also watched every episode of the Superman T.V. show.

Hollywoodland shot for six weeks in Toronto and two in Los Angeles. At some point, Warner Brothers, which produced the Superman films, applied legal pressure to have the name changed from Truth, Justice and the American Way to the current title because they wanted to disassociate themselves from the sordid details of Reeves’ demise with their vested interest in rebooting the Superman franchise.

Hollywoodland received mixed to negative reviews as most praised Affleck’s performance but had problems with the way the script juggled the two storylines. In his review for The New York Observer, Andrew Sarris wrote, “Hollywoodland gets a few laughs from the show’s cheesy Ed Wood–like production effects, but the dignity and sobriety that Mr. Affleck projects as Reeves keeps the sheer ridiculousness of his limited career options from ever becoming too campy.” The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis also praised Affleck’s performance: “Later, as defeat takes its grinding toll, Mr. Affleck lets weariness creep into his face, pulling his features down until it becomes difficult smile.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B+” rating and Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote, “There's something simultaneously heartfelt, wised-up, playful, and fierce about the way the onetime Daredevil acknowledges that he knows that we know that he knows that we're bound to read something of the actor's own skids with fame in his expiatory portrayal of a star who couldn't quite steer his own image.”

However, New York magazine’s David Edelstein wrote, “the back-and-forth cutting between past and present would be clunky even if it weren’t so arbitrary, and it doesn’t help that Adrien Brody—as the film’s ­other protagonist, a burnt-out gumshoe—is more actorish than the supposed actor.” USA Today gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and Claudia Puig wrote, “But then the narrative bogs down with a misbegotten subplot about Simo's personal life … Director Allen Coulter … missteps with this secondary story line. He flounders in his attempts to find parallels between Simo's life and Reeves' iconic place in Hollywood at that time.” In his review for the Washington Post, Stephen Hunter wrote, “For some reason, the director and the writer (Paul Bernbaum) have chosen an exceedingly awkward path into the material. They break the narrative into two strands, and play them off each other in cheap and easy ways for insubstantial effect.” The Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan wrote, “For despite its virtues, Hollywoodland never fully succeeds due to the unfortunate air of artificiality that hangs over it. Caught in a netherworld between re-creation and reality, it only sporadically feels like it is actually happening.” Finally, in his review for the Village Voice, J. Hoberman wrote, “Coulter contrived a neat behavioral trick by inducing his star to play a comparably big-jawed bad actor. Surrounded as he is by canny professionals … it's an unexpectedly touching performance. In fact, Hollywoodland turns turgid whenever it switches to the gritty Louis Simo story.”

The attention to period detail is very good, from the vintage cars to the Coke bottle Simo drinks from in a scene. The filmmakers effortlessly transport us back to that time. Allen Coulter’s direction is solid but does little to differentiate it from other films of the genre. L.A. Confidential this is not. Maybe it’s just as well as the story is engrossing enough and Affleck’s performance keeps our interest. Ultimately, Hollywoodland lies somewhere between the ambitious but flawed Mulholland Falls (1996) and the masterful L.A Confidential. What it does do is paint a compelling and sympathetic portrait of George Reeves. His career serves as a sobering reminder of the dangers of being closely identified with an iconic film role and how it can affect the rest of your career. Some people embrace it while others spend the rest of their lives trying to get away from it.

Suture

Scott McGehee and David Siegel are part of a generation of American independent filmmakers that capitalized on the surprise success of Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies & Videotape (1989) at the Sundance Film Festival. That film helped kickstart a very prolific period of indie cinema during the 1990s where the rise in prominence of Sundance and boutique movie studios like Miramax pushed through unusual material, like McGehee and Siegel’s Suture (1993), that wouldn’t normally have been made or distributed. These two filmmakers even managed to get Soderbergh to executive produce their film and he championed it in interviews. Sadly, the studio distributing Suture had no idea how to market this cerebral neo-noir and it quickly faded into obscurity where it still resides to this day. Even back then it was a hard sell with an unconventional premise and no movie stars but should now be regarded as a bold genre experiment.


Vincent (Michael Harris) and Clay (Dennis Haysbert) are brothers. The only thing is that Clay is African American and Vincent is white – something that is never once acknowledged or commented on by anyone. Amazingly, at one point, Clay even remarks at how much they look alike even though they don’t actually resemble each other in any way. They reconnect after the death of their father that, unbeknownst to Clay, Vincent murdered. He ends up stealing Clay’s identity and blows him up in a car, leaving him for dead. However, Clay manages to survive the explosion but has to undergo extensive surgery and wakes up with amnesia. He is told that he’s Vincent. Dr. Renee Descartes (Mel Harris) helps reconstruct Clay physically while Dr. Max Shinoda (Sab Shimono) tries to fix him psychologically. Clay has to somehow rediscover his own identity and clear his name.

Dennis Haysbert, who would go on to appear in such diverse films as Michael Mann’s Heat (1995) and Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven (2002), is quite good as Clay, a man framed for a crime he did not commit by his own brother. He comes across as quite sympathetic as Clay tries to rebuild his life and figure out who he is. His dreams may be the key to unlocking his true identity. By casting Haysbert as Vincent’s brother, McGehee and Siegel weren’t interested in commenting on race relations in the United States but wanted to keep the film in the “parameters of sociology than of race, the way the homogeneity of society affects the construction of a personal identity.” The narrative says that Clay and Vincent look alike and they don’t know that they’re different. We are acutely aware of it and reminded visually by the filmmakers

McGehee and Siegel had been working together since 1989. Prior to Suture, their only filmmaking experience was two short films: Birds Past (1989) and Speak Then Persephone (1990). They set up a limited partnership and raised the one million dollar budget by borrowing from family and friends. According to McGehee, with Suture they wanted to “construct a story that was generally about identity.” They decided to shoot the film in Phoenix, Arizona because he felt that it was “almost like an abandoned city, it’s so large and overbuilt and the streets are so dead it feels empty.” They liked the city’s “high modernist, very sparse aesthetic” and used its stunning, timeless architecture to “create a sort of unreal space,” McGehee said.

McGehee and Siegel employ stunning black and white Cinemascope photography that evokes classic film noir. They were actually influenced by mid-1960s Japanese films like Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another (1965) which utilized widescreen black and white cinematography. They wanted to give Suture an early ‘60s sensibility and loved the black and white Cinemascope films from that period, like The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Seconds (1966). According to Siegel, “it’s an absolutely gripping look that’s used so rarely today, and it’s a look from a time period that we wanted to evoke.” The way each scene is shot and the composition of the frame is quite impressive coming from first-time feature filmmakers with no formal filmmaking training. This is an elegantly-shot film and not at all like a lot of indie films that have a low budget look and feel.

After seeing an early rough cut of Suture, Steven Soderbergh became fascinated with the film and helped McGehee and Siegel find completion finances during post-production. Suture had its premiere at the 1993 Telluride Film Festival and went on to be screened at the Toronto and Sundance Film Festivals. The film was not well-received by critics at the time. Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars and felt that McGehee and Siegel were, “apparently more concerned with how the movie looks than how it plays.” In her review for The New York Times, Caryn James wrote, “The best way to approach Suture is to consider it a witty, stylish goof on psychiatry, identity and murder mysteries.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “C+” rating and Lisa Schwarzbaum described the story as “clever but ultimately overworked.” In his review for the Washington Post, Desson Howe found it to be “constantly engaging – and weird,” while also an “atmospheric B-movie melodrama, modish existentialism and pared-down film noir.”

Suture’s initial conceit of two actors that look nothing alike playing brothers is pretty audacious and the biggest hurdle to pass if one is to get into the story. It does give the story some added resonance as notions of race and class are raised. When we first meet Vincent, he wears immaculate white suits and appears quite wealthy, driving around in an expensive car. Clay, on the other hand, arrives into town on the bus and dresses like a blue collar worker. Suture is also quite a fascinatingly complex psychological thriller. It is preoccupied with the notion of identity. How do we know who we are? How do our memories contribute to our identity? What happens when we no longer have memories to help define who we are? The film asks some pretty deep questions and wrestles with some pretty weighty themes for a noir. Clay has to assemble his identity like a jigsaw puzzle – piece by piece and it is only once he has everything in place that he is able to see the big picture.

JGL Blog-a-thon: The Lookout

BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post is part of the Joseph Gordon Levitt Blog-a-thon over at the Detailed Criticisms blog. This is also a reprint of a DVD review I did for this film a few years ago.

With his adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s novel, Out of Sight, Scott Frank demonstrated a knack for crime thrillers with plenty of plot twists and double crosses. Now, he’s finally gotten the chance to direct his own movie and the result is The Lookout (2007), a neo-noir that evokes other crime movies like Charley Varrick (1973) and Fargo (1996).


Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a young hockey player with a promising career that is snuffed out in an instant thanks to a car accident that he caused. Four years later, he’s working as a night janitor at a local Midwestern bank located out in the middle of nowhere and dealing with a head injury from the accident. He has to write down everything that he does to get ready every day. His old life is gone and his new one is one mundane day after another. Chris now lives with Lewis (Jeff Daniels), his blind roommate who helps the young man out with things around their apartment.

Chris meets Gary (Matthew Goode) at a bar one night. He’s a genial guy who befriends the young man over beers. Chris also meets a beautiful young woman named Luvlee (Isla Fisher) who is friends with Gary. They quickly go to work on Chris, Gary appealing to his brain and Luvlee to his heart. They make him feel like he belongs which is important to him because his family doesn’t know how to relate to him anymore. Pretty soon Gary tells Chris about a bank heist he plans to pull with his buddies. The bank that they are targeting just happens to be the one that Chris works at. Gary dangles the proverbial carrot in front of Chris with the promise of money and the power that comes with it. He is very persuasive and knows exactly which buttons to push. Like most heist films, things do not go according to plan and the rest of the film deals with the aftershocks.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt continues his knack for offbeat roles. He does a great job portraying someone with neurological damage and the frustration that comes from not being able to do simple things like opening a can of food or remembering someone’s name. He also conveys the guilt his character feels over the car accident that cost two of his friends their lives and robbed him of a promising future. We see how he tries to hide his disorder and the frustration of not being able to do basic things. It’s a performance grounded in realism that is in contrast to this stylized noir world. It doesn’t hurt that he is surrounded by cold, detached characters, and this makes him very sympathetic as well.

Jeff Daniels steals pretty much every scene he’s in as Chris’ genial roommate. The actor displays a dry sense of humor that is very funny to see in action. He and Gordon-Levitt’s character make for very unlikely roommates to say the least but the two actors make it work thanks to the excellent chemistry they have together. Along with The Squid in the Whale (2005) and Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), Daniels is turning out to be quite an excellent character actor appearing in several well-made independent films.

Scott Frank has a keen visual sense, adopting a predominantly dark color scheme in keeping with the neo-noir tradition. With The Lookout, he has crafted a clever little thriller with a fascinating protagonist at its center. What could have easily been a forgettable film is anchored by yet another riveting performance by Gordon-Levitt.

Special Features:

“Behind the Mind of Christ Pratt” features an interview with the film’s star, Joseph Gordon-Levitt. He was drawn to the complexity of the character and ended up living with the role for almost a year. He talks about how he portrayed Chris and speaks intelligently about his take on the material.

“Sequencing The Lookout” takes a look at various aspects of the movie: the script, casting, the look, and so on in an interesting way. Frank says that he was influenced by European thrillers that emphasized character. He talks about the origins of the story as well.

Finally, there is an audio commentary by writer/director Scott Frank and his director of photography Alar Kivilo. They talk about the challenge of shooting in the wilds of Canada. It was spring when they started but the temperature was very cold. Frank isn’t afraid to point out the mistakes he made as a first-time director. With Kivilo, their comments tend to be about filmmaking techniques like the cameras they used, the type of shots for a given scene and locations used. This could come across as kind of dull if you’re not into the technical aspects of film.