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The Empire Strikes Back
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What Goes Around
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May 16-22, 2002

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Another Fine Meth

Tattoo you: An inked-up Val Kilmer in <i>The Salton Sea</i>.

Tattoo you: An inked-up Val Kilmer in The Salton Sea.

The Salton Sea charts amphetamine-fueled delusions and winds up grounded.

The Salton Sea

by Cindy Fuchs

The Salton SeaDirected by D.J. Caruso A Warner Brothers release Opens Friday at area theaters

“Sometimes you can see the world so clearly.” And more often than not, when you’re thinking this sort of thing, you’re under the influence of serious drugs. Just so, when elaborately tattooed tweaker/snitch Danny Parker (Val Kilmer) is thinking it, in his voiceover for The Salton Sea, his view is decidedly skewed by lack of sleep, thirst for vengeance and all strains of methamphetamine.

The first scene of D.J. Caruso's debut feature suggests that Danny's look-back at his life has a certain urgency: He's shot in the gut, unable to get himself out of his blazing apartment. This unpleasant circumstance, you eventually learn, results from a couple of Danny's many betrayals and offenses. Being a junkie, informer and liar doesn't win you many friends. The only one he does have, an affable speed freak named Jimmy the Finn (Peter Sarsgaard), is so puppy-dog devoted that he has Danny's mohawked portrait tattooed on his arm.

Danny's story is part nightmare, part scam saga and part junkie-underground travelogue. The film is composed of flashbacks to his former life as professional trumpet player Tom Van Allen, blissfully married to the ethereal Liz (Chandra West). A couple of sleazebag drug-heisters shoot her in the head in front of him, and she inexplicably stays alive long enough to give him an excruciatingly sweet goodbye smile, thus granting a rationale for his improbable, self-destructive vengeance scheme.

Immersing himself in L.A.'s street scene for months (or is it years?), Danny hooks up with a pair of super-sleazy cops, Garcetti (Anthony LaPaglia) and Morgan (Doug Hutchison), to whom he delivers small-time dealers and users. One of these is Bobby Ocean (Glenn Plummer), whose own identity expands considerably under the influence: "I don't mean to impose," he rants, spear gun in hand, "but I am the ocean." (Meanwhile, he keeps "Mrs. Ocean" stuffed under the mattress.) As bizarre as this fellow is plainly designed to appear, his subsequent suicide is disturbing (splat on the pavement below his apartment window), and Danny's lack of response is even more so. Your point of identification, in other words, is psycho.

Danny's self-measure is plainly perverse: He invites beatdowns from the cops, as if such punishment restores a semblance of moral order to his disjointed existence. He's so undercover that he's lost track of his own identity.

The problem is, it doesn't much matter. Tony Gayton's screenplay lays out a series of vignettes, moments of fleeting "clarity," but little coherence. Granted, this is a point in itself, but doesn't help the film's noir cliches seem any fresher. By turns brutally outrageous and modishly too-cool-for-room, The Salton Sea is occasionally entertaining (a crew of villains restage the Kennedy assassination with pigeons in a remote-controlled car). Supporting characters are extreme, but still stock: the distressed damsel, Colette (Deborah Kara Unger), is trembling-lipped fragile; his deal-making buyer, Bubba (B.D. Wong), is a gonzo-faux-cowboy; and the scary big-time dealer, Pooh Bear (Vincent D'Onofrio), is fantastically scary: He's blown away his nose with drugs (he wears a prosthetic), and keeps a wild badger to set loose on nemeses' penises.

Arranged via standard junkie-movie hallucinatory wide-angles and saturated colors, these parts are more interesting than their sum. Seeing the world clearly is overrated. You've been here before.

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