nwasianweekly.com
Nov. 24, 2007

Images provided by Samuel Goldwyn Films

Actress Bai Ling raises her glass and lowers her neckline in “Southland Tales,” the latest movie by the director of “Donnie Darko.”

‘The Rock’ hits bottom in ‘Southland Tales"

By N.P. Thompson
Northwest Asian Weekly

At its 2006 premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, Richard Kelly’s “Southland Tales” met with a nearly unanimous chorus of disapproval. A year and a half later, a new and supposedly improved version arrives in theaters.

It has happened before in movie history: An ambitious director will have a disastrous opening, then recut the picture in hopes of salvaging something, yet find that there isn’t much to salvage.

So it goes with the apocalyptic doomsday fantasy, “Southland Tales,” which parades pop icons such as Justin Timberlake, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Sarah Michelle Gellar in an incoherent mess that deserves to go down as a “Heaven’s Gate” for hipsters. That the film’s story makes no sense may be the least of its problems. Nonetheless, I’ll give it a try: Kelly’s scenario unfurls in an alternate universe that’s a lot like ours, only more so.

It’s the summer of 2008, wars rage between the United States, Syria, and North Korea, among others. Abilene, Texas, has been nuked in a so-called “American Hiroshima,” and the Venice and Hermosa Beach communities of Southern California swarm with a coalition of loud, vulgar and drug-addicted Neo-Marxist dissidents/performance artists who are out to sabotage the Republican presidential campaign of Sen. Bobby Frost (played with as much dignity as possible by Holmes Osborne). The Republicans, in turn, thanks to the Patriot Act, have instituted a surveillance think-tank that video monitors every single intimate act of suspected terrorists, including something referred to as “bathroom detail.”

The movie has several adjoining plots and subplots, none of which are worth the space it would take to explicate. Kelly, who also wrote and directed the cult favorite, “Donnie Darko,” jostles myriad influences, among them Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil,” David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive,” T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men” and the futuristic novels of Kurt Vonnegut.

Timberlake, as a young veteran named Pilot Abilene, supplies “Southland Tales” with endless voiceover narration in an effort to tie some of these strands together. His portentous pronouncements sound like imitation Philip K. Dick: “His mission was to impersonate his twin brother, but his heart was filled with despair.” (Timberlake, wearing a blood-soaked T-shirt, also gets to pour beer over his head in an especially ill-conceived song-and-dance number.)

Aside from the Samoan-descended Johnson, the Asian performers here are relegated mainly to the background and white lab coats. There are two unfortunate exceptions. In the movie’s most offensive concoction, the Japanese Prime Minister Hideo Takehashi (is the name intended as homage to the poet and peace worker Hideo Takahashi?) agrees to sell one of his fingers to a mad scientist (Wallace Shawn). What might have been mildly ludicrous becomes, in Kelly’s approach, blatantly racist.

The prime minister has his entire hand chopped off with a meat cleaver, and the director plays this, as well as the victim’s accompanying screams, as a joke. We’re invited to laugh not only at his suffering, but at his presumed stupidity. Granted, this movie has no compassion for any of its caricatures, yet the grossness and cruelty of the implications here are close to intolerable. (One well-respected Seattle film critic walked out of the press screening after this scene.) In his heavily accented English, Takehashi recalls Jerry Lewis’ or Mickey Rooney’s misbegotten stereotypes of how a Japanese man speaks, except that the role is played by a Japanese American actor, Sab Shimono.

Less appallingly, but no less stereotypically, the Chinese actress Bai Ling shows up as an “exotic Oriental” villain, Serpentine. She functions much as a Bond girl from the politically incorrect ’60s: She flirts cryptically with The Rock, then is promptly disposed of.

More peculiar still, for a movie that aims to condemn the Iraq war and the curtailing of our civil liberties post-Sept.11, Kelly makes his freedom fighters (who include Cheri Oteri and Nora Dunn) so crude, amoral and repugnant that “Southland Tales” has the unintended effect of evoking sympathy for the Republicans it rallies against.

N.P. Thompson can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.

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