Southland Tales

In Donnie Darko (2001) director Richard Kelley melded teen-angst and love with wormholes and time travel and an oversized rabbit that may or may not exist. He did this in a way that was fascinating, poignant, thought-provoking, and entertaining on any number of levels. The film became a cult phenomenon. In Southland Tales (2006) Richard Kelley completely fails. The film is casually, clumsily made, poorly acted, turgid, excessively complicated, full of sophomoric strainings towards intellectual profundity, politically as sophisticated as Pink Floyd's The Wall. It features frequent quotations from the book of Revelations, spoken by Justin Timberlake. The Republican candidate for President is Bobby Frost, who quotes from "The Road Not Taken." His running mate is Eliot (perhaps Thomas Stearns Eliot, whose lines from "The Hollow Men" are quoted several times, "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper"). Numerous actors make appearances that simply amplify the chaos (Janeane Garofolo, Amy Poehler, Justin Timberlake, Wallace Shawn, John Laroquette, Jon Lovitz, Mandy Moore, others). This film is so disappointing that it makes one wonder whether Donnie Darko could have been more an accident than something made by intent.

The basic plot covers the last three days of the earth. At some point in the recent past terrorists detonated an atomic bomb somewhere in Texas. Thus the film portrays a post-apocalyptic world, though it is not clear where additional atomic bombings have occurred. Numerous wars have broken out, including one in Syria. Society seems to be in a state of chaos. The world portrayed in the film appears to be our own, just before the 2008 presidential elections. I could attempt a more detailed summary of the plot, but to do so would suggest that I can make sense of the various plotlines, or that there is sense to make of them to begin with. They have to do with the disappearance of Senator Frost's son-in-law (Dwayne Johnson, "The Rock"), who is apparently kidnapped by an extremist group. He reappears several days later, afflicted with amnesia. A tear in the space-time continuum has opened up somewhere in the California desert. Several individuals who come in contact with the tear begin appearing in two places at once. Towards the end of the film we learn that if one individual comes in contact with his duplicate self, the tear in the space time continuum will consume and destroy the earth. This is communicated to us by the Rock in the film's most memorable statement: "The fourth dimension will collapse upon itself . . . you stupid bitch." There is also the launching of a giant blimp, two cars fornicating in the driveway, a writer who lives events he has already written about in a screenplay, a reality show for valley girls, a rebellion fomented by a terrorist group called the Neo-Marxists. And so on.

Creativity and originality do not mean self-indulgence.

I wanted to like the film. I'd read the scathing reviews, but I thought I might see something others didn't. Not so.