Post by stephen on Dec 6, 2018 16:21:40 GMT
It Follows was one of my very favorite films of 2015, and perhaps my favorite horror movie of the last decade (well, either that or I Saw the Devil). So when I heard that director David Robert Mitchell was following it up with a sprawling noir set in L.A., I was immediately on board. Had it in my "most anticipated" list and everything. Then it bowed at Cannes, got some rather polarizing reactions, and was snatched away for recuts. While I've never been one to put much stock in critics' takes from Cannes (films they despised include Wild at Heart and Only God Forgives, two favorites of mine), I admit I was leery. Was this going to be a sprawling Pynchonian jaunt the way Inherent Vice was, or would it be a rambling shaggy beast of a movie that's all fluff and no meat?
Having recently watched it, I feel I have to say that it falls far short of the former and is much more in line with the latter. It was frustratingly, agonizingly obtuse, and while I don't mind if a film shoots for inscrutability, it only works if it isn't a deliberate exercise in byzantine patience-trying. Mitchell must have looked at films like Inherent Vice and especially The Big Lebowski and thought, "Well, the core mystery wasn't that important in those movies; it's all about the journey, man" before returning to his hookah with a self-satisfied grin on his face. But this movie exists for no other reason than to remind us of the genius of Anderson and the Coens, for being able to craft such a story without getting lost in the weeds or, as this movie does, up its own ass.
Most noirs tend to have a protagonist who is something of a cipher: Sam Spade, the Continental Op, Doc Sportello and even The Dude hardly dwell on their backstories, and more or less focus on the here-and-now. It Follows takes it one step further by having a main character who doesn't even have a name (seriously, I don't think I caught his name until the credits -- it's Sam, apparently). Andrew Garfield's character is more than just a cipher; he's a nobody in the truest sense of the word. He has no job, no prospects, no hobbies save for whacking it to the same issue of Playboy and ogling sexy neighbors with his binoculars. If someone took Jimmy Stewart's hobbled Rear Window character and made him a chronic masturbator with zero people skills, you'd have this guy. Indeed, the film's "plot" stems from Garfield's budding obsession with his new neighbor (Riley Keough, herself a fine fit for the noir damsel role), who disappears in the middle of the night, causing Garfield's obsession to take on a somewhat maniacal edge as he begins to unravel a potential city-spanning conspiracy involving dog killers, homeless kings, celebrity death masks and former soap starlets who moonlight as escorts.
For his part, Garfield wanders through the film in a stupefied daze, like he was conked on the head an hour before the camera started rolling and he's just now starting to get his bearings. He possesses a weird predatory energy as well, which I think makes you wish he got the shit kicked out of him more often than it does in this film (to its credit, he takes his lumps more than once). I've rarely found Garfield to be a particularly riveting cinematic presence, and the way he is just buffeted from one strange scene to another gets tiresome after a while. He's not a compelling enough actor as it is, and now he's saddled with a thoroughly noisome tissue-thin archetype, trying to struggle through a story with all of the grace of a mastodon caught in the La Brea tar pits.
To its credit, the film is prettily shot and designed, and Disasterpeace returns to turn in a spookily evocative neo-noir score. But that doesn't change the fact that Under the Silver Lake is a bewildering noggin-scratcher, and not in the way Mitchell intended. You're not pondering the mystery at the heart of it, but rather the mystery of how it was ever conceived, and how sheer ambition can cripple even the brightest young talents.
Having recently watched it, I feel I have to say that it falls far short of the former and is much more in line with the latter. It was frustratingly, agonizingly obtuse, and while I don't mind if a film shoots for inscrutability, it only works if it isn't a deliberate exercise in byzantine patience-trying. Mitchell must have looked at films like Inherent Vice and especially The Big Lebowski and thought, "Well, the core mystery wasn't that important in those movies; it's all about the journey, man" before returning to his hookah with a self-satisfied grin on his face. But this movie exists for no other reason than to remind us of the genius of Anderson and the Coens, for being able to craft such a story without getting lost in the weeds or, as this movie does, up its own ass.
Most noirs tend to have a protagonist who is something of a cipher: Sam Spade, the Continental Op, Doc Sportello and even The Dude hardly dwell on their backstories, and more or less focus on the here-and-now. It Follows takes it one step further by having a main character who doesn't even have a name (seriously, I don't think I caught his name until the credits -- it's Sam, apparently). Andrew Garfield's character is more than just a cipher; he's a nobody in the truest sense of the word. He has no job, no prospects, no hobbies save for whacking it to the same issue of Playboy and ogling sexy neighbors with his binoculars. If someone took Jimmy Stewart's hobbled Rear Window character and made him a chronic masturbator with zero people skills, you'd have this guy. Indeed, the film's "plot" stems from Garfield's budding obsession with his new neighbor (Riley Keough, herself a fine fit for the noir damsel role), who disappears in the middle of the night, causing Garfield's obsession to take on a somewhat maniacal edge as he begins to unravel a potential city-spanning conspiracy involving dog killers, homeless kings, celebrity death masks and former soap starlets who moonlight as escorts.
For his part, Garfield wanders through the film in a stupefied daze, like he was conked on the head an hour before the camera started rolling and he's just now starting to get his bearings. He possesses a weird predatory energy as well, which I think makes you wish he got the shit kicked out of him more often than it does in this film (to its credit, he takes his lumps more than once). I've rarely found Garfield to be a particularly riveting cinematic presence, and the way he is just buffeted from one strange scene to another gets tiresome after a while. He's not a compelling enough actor as it is, and now he's saddled with a thoroughly noisome tissue-thin archetype, trying to struggle through a story with all of the grace of a mastodon caught in the La Brea tar pits.
To its credit, the film is prettily shot and designed, and Disasterpeace returns to turn in a spookily evocative neo-noir score. But that doesn't change the fact that Under the Silver Lake is a bewildering noggin-scratcher, and not in the way Mitchell intended. You're not pondering the mystery at the heart of it, but rather the mystery of how it was ever conceived, and how sheer ambition can cripple even the brightest young talents.