My Year of Flops: The A.V. Club Presents One Man's Journey Deep into the Heart of Cinematic Failure

by Nathan Rabin

  A certain derangement was hard-wired into the film’s DNA. Original director Richard Stanley was fired in the early going yet remained so keen to work with Brando that he ended up playing one of the film’s mutated man-animal hybrids. In Moreau, Brando symbolically passes down the straitjacket of supreme craziness to Val Kilmer, whose alternately droll and deranged performance suggests how Jim Morrison might have turned out if he’d turned to mad science instead of music.

  David Thewlis sweatily inhabits the thankless lead role of Edward Douglas, an incredulous everyman rescued by the eccentric Montgomery (Kilmer) while adrift at sea, then taken to a mysterious island where Nobel Prize winner Dr. Moreau (who presumably cleaned up in the Crimes Against Nature category) is attempting to build a utopia and perfect nature by transforming animals into hideous half-human mutants and drugging and shocking them into submission. How could anything go wrong?

  Dr. Moreau and Montgomery preserve an artificial calm, keeping the creatures in line with electric shocks when they misbehave and doping them with morphine, methamphetamines, “shrooms and some other shit” to “mellow them out” and “keep them coming back for more.” Dr. Moreau, resplendent in flowing robes, behaves like a foppish doting dad, delivering bite-sized nuggets of civilization to his alternately worshipful and resentful minions in the form of Bible verses and piano recitals where he performs alongside his very own mini-me.

  Brando doesn’t enter the film until half an hour in and (spoiler alert!) he bites it a little over half an hour later. At that point, the steadily escalating insanity of Kilmer’s performance reaches an apex: He dons white pancake makeup and white robes to launch into an unspeakably cruel Brando caricature that competes with—and at times even upstages—Brando’s equally cruel caricature of himself. Kilmer doesn’t play the role so much as lampoon it. There are subversive air quotes around every line. Kilmer does his damnedest to outcrazy Brando, and he succeeds with surprising frequency.

  Though it’s a tonal and thematic mess, Dr. Moreau is rife with indelible moments. Most of them belong to Kilmer, from the scene where he tenderly strokes a rabbit, holds it up to Thewlis so he can kiss it, then casually, briskly breaks its neck, to a death scene that hurls itself into the annals of camp history: swathed in white fabric, with white goo on his face, a drug-addled Montgomery impersonates a lisping, effete Dr. Moreau and reads aloud from Arthur Conan Doyle before he’s killed by a trigger-happy mutant dog-boy. It is, perhaps, not the most dignified death.

  The film coalesces into a blunt allegory about how the failures of society arise out of the flawed essence of human nature. Human nature, with its insatiable lust for power and propensity for violence, proves the semi-human islanders’ undoing as much as their animal instincts. As Montgomery might argue, aren’t we the real animals?

  But by the time the manimals start firing automatic weapons at each other, any pretensions to social commentary have been lost in a sea of empty spectacle. An indifferently filmed shoot-out is an indifferently filmed shoot-out, whether the gun lovers involved are Steven Seagal or puny man-animals.

  Just before slurring one of the all-time great terrible last lines (“I want to go to dog heaven”), Kilmer utters, with sublime understatement, a line that could double as the film’s epitaph: “Well, things didn’t work out.”

  Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Fiasco

  Spaced-Out Oddity Case File #91: Southland Tales

  Originally Posted December 6, 2007

  I began eying 2006’s Southland Tales greedily the moment I learned of its existence. Writer-director Richard Kelly saw his fortunes rise with those of Donnie Darko, his 2001 cult debut. While still in his 20s, Kelly was hailed as the David Lynch of his generation. Disastrously, Kelly seems to have believed the hype. The five-year gap between Donnie Darko and its follow-up only raised expectations for Southland Tales. Would the film represent a grand evolutionary leap forward, or a huge step back? Would it be his career-making Boogie Nights, or a sophomore slump?

  With Southland Tales, Kelly offers not just a movie but a mind-melting multimedia experience, a vast, sprawling, absurdist universe, complete with three graphic-novel prequels. The film probably makes more sense to people who’ve read those, though I imagine that complete comprehension is impossible, even to Kelly himself. If a man as learned as cast member Wallace Shawn couldn’t understand it after three viewings, what chance do any of us have?

  So if Southland Tales feels like a third sequel to something that didn’t make sense in the first place, that’s because it is. In between Darko and Tales, Kelly worked on screenplays that unfortunately didn’t get produced (a nixed adaptation of Holes) and screenplays that unfortunately did get produced (Domino). On the basis of Southland Tales, however, it’s safe to assume that Kelly spent much of the intervening years smoking pot, reading The Progressive, and steadily going insane. Politics and good intentions have ruined more filmmakers than drugs and money combined. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, especially in tandem with too much ambition and too little self-discipline.

  Southland Tales opens with a nuclear blast in Texas in an alternate-universe 2005, and an endless orgy of voice-over narration from haunted veteran Private Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake). The United States responded to a nuclear attack on July 4, 2005, by taking a fierce rightward turn. World War III brought the pain to Iran, North Korea, and various other supporters of evildoers. Now, a sinister entity called US-IDENT spies on the American populace and polices the world webernet with an iron fist.

  A revolutionary group known as the neo-Marxists, populated disproportionately by distaff Saturday Night Live alums (Amy Poehler, Nora Dunn, Cheri Oteri), has brainwashed Iraq War veteran Roland Taverner (Seann William Scott) as a way of faking a Rodney King–like videotape exposing police brutality, in hopes of instigating a revolt against the repressive new social order. Meanwhile, Boxer Santoros, an amnesiac action star with ties to the Republican party (Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, a real-life action star with ties to the Republican party), has written “a screenplay that foretold the tale of our destruction,” but it’s being ignored (no doubt due to third-act problems and a perfunctory diamond-smuggling subplot). Sarah Michelle Gellar plays Johnson’s girlfriend, Krysta Kapowski, a porn star, current-events-chat-show host, and one-woman media empire whose most recent release is a pop single called “Teen Horniness Is Not A Crime.” Got all that? Good.

  Also involved: Booger from Revenge Of The Nerds, monkeys traveling through a rift in the space-time continuum, that weird old woman from Poltergeist, enigmatic spit-curled billionaire Baron Von Westphalen (Wallace Shawn), and Walter Mung (Christopher Lambert), an arms dealer who operates out of an ice-cream truck. Oh, and Bai Ling doing some weird snake-hipped dance aboard a mega-zeppelin. And Kevin Smith with a wizardly beard and (intentionally?) unconvincing old-man makeup that makes him look like the bastard offspring of Gandalf the Grey, Santa Claus, and ZZ Top. And a magical new energy source and a crazy new hallucinogenic drug. Oh, and the whole thing might just be an elaborate religious allegory. Or a dream. Or not.

  Southland Tales is many things: a prescient glimpse into a looming apocalypse, a dark science-fiction comedy, pop-culture-damaged surrealism, and a passionate plea for the decriminalization of teen horniness. It’s a film of rare courage, a one-of-a-kind trip through the looking glass, and a meditation on uncertain times and the sins of the Bush administration. It’s also a gargantuan mess—disjointed, leadenly paced, and filled with ideas introduced and abandoned in the same manic, overheated rush.

  It’s as if Kelly jotted down every loopy conceit and crackpot idea he could think of, combined them with his dream journal, then decided they were strong enough that he could simply film his dreams and notes without going through the trouble of channeling them into a lucid, complete narrative.

  Southland Tales debuted at Cannes in 2006 in a nearly three-hour-long version to less-than-stellar reviews. Kelly trimmed the film to a still-endless 144 minutes, but that co
uldn’t save his weird little Eraserhead-looking baby from a quick commercial death.

  I found a lot to love about Southland Tales. I dug the shaggy, loopy brilliance of throwaway lines like, “Scientists are predicting the future will be much more futuristic than originally predicted.” Deep into the film, Kelly indulges in a stand-alone music-video sequence where a scarred, sinister Timberlake, decked out in a bloody shirt, stares menacingly at the camera and lip-synchs to the Killers’ “All The Things I’ve Done” while drinking a can of Budweiser, as dancers in sexy nurse costumes writhe lasciviously in the background. Why? Why not? Does it make any more or less sense than anything else in the film?

  Some of Southland Tales’ stunt casting pays huge dividends, like Jon Lovitz’s bizarre turn as silver-haired, raspy-voiced psycho cop Bart Bookman, and Johnson’s agreeably deranged performance. Johnson oozes self-assurance on-screen; that’s what makes him such a convincing action hero. But here, he’s as scared as a lost little boy. In that respect, his bravely bizarre, unself-conscious performance recalls Mark Wahlberg in I ĸ Huckabees. They’re both exemplars of macho certainty playing lonely, confused characters who have no idea what they’re doing, where they’re headed, or how they fit into the big picture. I especially liked the way Johnson tents his hands together and lets his fingers flutter nervously, even girlishly. Johnson could develop into a terrific character actor.

  Kelly unleashes such an endless, dizzying torrent of ideas, pop-culture references, and incongruous juxtapositions that some are bound to register. A fuzzy social satire, surrealistic tour de force, half-assed political treatise, and vanity project all rolled into one, Southland Tales hits its targets only about 5 to 10 percent of the time, but when it does, it makes a Nagasaki-level impact. I can’t say I enjoyed Southland Tales, but I can’t stop thinking about isolated moments and images. The man atop a floating ice-cream truck filled with heavenly light, shooting a mega-zeppelin with a shoulder-mounted missile, for example, will stay with me long after better, more coherent films have faded from memory.

  Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Fiasco

  Wallace Shawn On Southland Tales

  The son of legendary longtime New Yorker editor William Shawn, Wallace Shawn is an actor, playwright, screenwriter, and author known for the dark, incendiary nature of his plays. He has appeared in Manhattan, My Dinner With Andre (which he also wrote), The Princess Bride, and Clueless in addition to providing the voice of Rex the Dinosaur in the Toy Story trilogy.

  Wallace Shawn: Well, I don’t think anybody really had a literal understanding of the script, and I have to say, I was very influenced by the story of the English actor Ralph Richardson. Ralph Richardson had been offered Waiting For Godot by Beckett, and he read it, and he said, “Well, I don’t understand a word of this, so I’m not going to be in it.” And he later said that was the greatest regret of his life. And he always felt bad about it. He really wished that he’d been in it. Should’ve just said, “This is great, it’s got something.”

  So I was kind of influenced by that, and I sort of thought—Richard Kelly had pictured me in the role of Baron Von Westphalen, so that was flattering and interesting. I saw his other film, Donnie Darko, and I thought, “Well, yeah. This is a very talented guy.” He’s younger than me, so it was a bit of a risk. I didn’t understand it; I didn’t understand what he was saying. Also, I have a very deep regard and respect for Karl Marx. I’m a left-wing person, and I’ve read Karl Marx, and I feel he was a great man. And the movie—I didn’t know what to make of the fact that Richard Kelly kept talking about Karl Marx. Was he making fun of him, or did he respect him, or was it just that the name was funny to him?

  Nathan Rabin: I think it may have been more of a Warholian kind of thing, where he was approaching him as an icon more than as a philosopher or political figure.

  WS: I think you’re on to it, sort of. He wasn’t commenting on Marx’s economic theories, it was something else. It was a bit Warholian. I had a lot of questions about whether I ought to get mixed up in it, but then ultimately meeting him, he’s an unusually charming and appealing person. And he’s very handsome, not at all the sort of weird, mad, creepy kind of person you would think had written that. I would have pictured that he would have looked, I don’t know, more like me! I was surprised at the fact that he was not a bizarre little madman. He was someone who could go to any dinner party and delight old ladies as well as young girls. He was very un-weird in his presentation of himself.

  NR: Did you ask him what he was going for, or if there was a sort of Rosetta stone to unlock what Southland Tales was all about?

  WS: At first, I asked him a few questions, but I quickly could see that the answers were in the language of film. So you would simply add another layer of mystery. There was no way that he was going to translate this into something that you’d put in the New York Times. It didn’t work that way for him. So I was astounded by the complete clarity and confidence with which each sequence of the film is made. The party on the spaceship, the blimp at the end, which is sort of a gathering of the elite of the United States. Everything is brilliantly done. Every single person that you see is magnificently cast, perfectly costumed. It’s a totally confident vision. And when he has the porno actresses, they are all in a perfectly consistent world of their own. And when he goes on to the pier, though they go to a bar, all the people in the bar are still done with incredible confidence. So he knew exactly what he was doing in those ways. The meaning of the whole was definitely difficult to pin down, but that’s not necessarily criticism. I did see it three times, and I liked it very much.

  NR: Did you figure out more each time you saw it?

  WS: Maybe a bit, but maybe if I’d seen it 10 times, I would have figured out more.

  NR: Was this the long version, the one that played at Cannes?

  WS: No, by the time I saw it, it was the shortened version.

  NR: The long version would almost have to clarify things or provide clues or hints that the truncated version didn’t.

  WS: You’d think that, but I’m not sure. Because, as I say, in talking to him, you really move along into further questions. And then of course there are the graphic novels that are associated with the film, which raised further questions. It doesn’t have a simple, clear plot or meaning that you’re gonna one day get.

  Big Green Brooding Case File #100: Hulk

  Originally Posted January 8, 2008

  2003’s Hulk is perhaps the highest-grossing film I’ve written about, having brought in a gaudy $62 million in its opening week. But the film’s box office nose-dived once poisonous word of mouth spread. Hulk represented a perverse case of bait and switch. The ads, poster, title, and fast-food tie-ins promised dumb fun about a big green monster who goes around smashing things. Instead, director Ang Lee and screenwriter James Schamus delivered an austere, cerebral exploration of the plight of an existential nowhere man. They screwed up a perfectly good smash-’em-up comic-book monster movie with their infernal “art” and “ideas.”

  Hulk is driven by two seemingly antithetical concepts. Lee set out to make a live-action issue of The Incredible Hulk that borrowed heavily from the visual vocabulary of comic books. So he divided the frame into panel-like segments via split screens, and employed cartoonish transitions. Second, he set out to elevate the plight of a humble scientist/giant green brute to the level of a Greek tragedy. To the eternal regret of Universal shareholders, he succeeded. He delivered a comic-book movie for folks whose idea of comic books involves Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, and maybe Art Spiegelman. Its target audience is New Yorker subscribers rather than acne-ridden teenagers.

  The film’s opening echoes the elliptical storytelling of comic books. It begins in the ’60s with the formative trauma of its protagonist’s life: being ripped away from his birth family and placed with an adoptive family. The boy, irreparably scarred by his mother’s death and his father’s unexplained absence, grows up to be scientist Bruce Banner (Eric Bana). The deeply repres
sed scientist sulks until enraged, at which point he transforms into a green giant with an appetite for destruction. He’s a good enough guy, but you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.

  Bruce soon gets a visit from his long-lost father (Nick Nolte), a maverick mad scientist with a look heavily indebted to late-period Unabomber. Bruce winds up waging a three-sided war against his crazy father, his own temper, and General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, a gruff, authoritarian general played by longtime mustache enthusiast Sam Elliott.

  In its first hour, Hulk boasts a hushed intensity that could easily pass for tedium. It’s a bravely quiet film filled with solemn conversations conducted in near whispers. The Hulk doesn’t appear in all his muscled-up glory until about 40 minutes in. Audiences who missed the opening credits could be forgiven for thinking they’d accidentally stumbled into an art movie.

  Lee seems to go out of his way to avoid indulging in anything that might be considered fun. He appears hell-bent on denying a blockbuster audience the visceral kicks they angrily demand. Lee’s Hulk smashes, but mostly he broods and aches. I appreciated the film’s intelligent subversion of the comic-book movie. Yet me also like when Hulk smash stuff. Everyone does. That’s why not even the film’s failure could kill off the franchise.

  Hulk can be chilly and inert in the early going, but it gains a strange cumulative power as it develops into both a sad family drama about the sins of the father and an elegant metaphor for the war on terror. The more the government tries to destroy Bruce’s Hulkism without understanding it or its underlying causes, the stronger and more resilient it becomes.