No Future in It

The world doesn't end soon enough in Richard Kelly's Southland Tales.

by Sam Adams

HITTING ROCK BOTTOM: Dwayne Johnson (left) and Seann William Scott explore post-nuclear L.A. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, or with a whimper, but with the whoosh of air out of a whoopee cushion. Richard Kelly's sprawling satire Southland Tales is a movie of limitless ambition and dazzling ineptitude, a movie of ideas with no ideas to speak of. Set in 2008 (which was slightly farther in the future at the film's 2006 Cannes premiere), the film is set in a hyper-real, post-nuclear Southern California where insufferable poets have become insufferable revolutionaries and porn stars cuckold the president's daughter while writing prophetic screenplays.

Summarizing Southland's scrambled plot would take pages and serve little purpose, but a few extracted elements might smooth our passage. At the center of the movie's twitching strands is one Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson, aka the Rock), who has recently awakened in the desert with his memory wiped clean. Returned to civilization, or at least Los Angeles, he falls in with adult actress Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), the host of a View-like chat show (if The View was staffed entirely by porn stars) and the singer behind the pop single "Teen Horniness Is Not a Crime." Their every move is closely monitored by a totalitarian mega-corporation called USIdent, as well as a shell-shocked Iraq veteran (Justin Timberlake) who watches through a rifle scope and offers narratorial guidance, if not much in the way of clarity.

The movie is rife with references, like a Republican president ticket composed of Eliot (as in T.S.) and Frost (as in Robert), but its self-conscious erudition is aggressively sophomoric. One character wryly notes that the "neo-Marxist" rebels don't seem to know much about Marx, but it's not clear that Kelly does either. Whizzing by at the speed of ADD, a few of Southland's concepts seem at least briefly intriguing, but it's hard to imagine how much thought could be provoked by a film that feels the need to repeatedly flash the legend, "The Internet is the future."

Like Star Wars, Southland opens with Chapter IV, although its first three installments are already available as graphic novels. Calling it "cartoonish" would be an insult to cartoons, but it certainly points at the heightened reality Kelly wants to achieve. The trouble is that apart from a few glancing references to current events, Southland has no reality to heighten. It's as far off the ground as the giant zeppelin that, for no apparent reason, suddenly appears in the movie's third act.

Kelly seems to think of himself, not without irony, as the equivalent of the artist-cum-revolutionaries who plan the movie's cockeyed insurrection. But for all its artistic daring, the movie places very little at risk. Trolling through L.A.'s underbelly with the windows rolled up, Southland is a spoiled suburbanite's Repo Man.

Apocalypse Cannes

Audiences at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival reacted with bafflement to Southland, and Kelly spent a year trimming 20 minutes from the running time, reworking Timberlake's Apocalypse Now narration and releasing three graphic-novel prequels. But no matter how discordant the movie may seem, Kelly assures viewers he knows what he's doing.

"It all has a design in my head," he says.

Borrowing a trope from the film, he says the design is serpentine, and that keeping the various plot strands from fouling is like "wrestling a snake under control. You want to have all the scenes transitioning as well as they can. You never want to throw anyone off the roller coaster. You want to keep all your passengers tucked safely beneath their protective harnesses, and be obviously overwhelmed with their head spinning, but you don't want to make anyone feel like, 'I want off.' You know it's a good ride if nobody puked."

That's not to say Kelly's design is immediately apparent, or even discernable. The scene where Timberlake lip-synchs the Killers' "All These Things That I've Done" in a Skee-Ball arcade while vinyl-clad nurses form a chorus line may look like a stylistic flourish, but he says, "To me, it's a telepathic transmission between two Iraq war veterans who have been exposed to a mind-altering drug, one of whom was wounded by a grenade the other one threw." He adds, "It makes more sense if you read the graphic novels."

Needless to say, Kelly doesn't expect audiences to get all this on first viewing. "I certainly hope it has time to marinate with an audience," he says. "I hope people will come back to try and decode the madness."

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Southland Tales

Written and directed by Richard Kelly

A Samuel Goldwyn Pictures release