The Cannes Cut of Southland Tales is a Warped Masterpiece
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A few years back I got an email from the good folks over at Arrow Video asking me if I would be interested in writing the liner notes for the Cannes Cut of Southland Tales.
Though I incorrectly deemed Southland Tales a fascinating mess rather than an out and out triumph at the time of its release, I leapt at the chance. I could not say yes quickly or enthusiastically enough.
Of course I wanted to be part of something like that. I’d written the liner notes for Donnie Darko for Arrow but this was a much bigger deal.
For starters, we were finally going to be able to see the two hour and thirty eight minute cut that was disastrously received at Cannes by a bunch of philistines who should all apologize to Richard Kelly and bring him and his family a delicious homemade dessert to apologize for being so wrong about his movie.
I’m sorry. I’m just really angry that the movie was so misunderstood and maligned. I’m hopped up on passion and indignation and the various substances that I took to be able to experience this one hundred and fifty eight minute mind-fuck in the best possible mindset.
Though I did not quite love Southland Tales the first, or second time around, I loved the idea of the movie. I loved its spirit. I loved its audacity. I loved its ambition. I loved how weirdly earnest and personal it was.
I was, in other words, looking for a reason and an opportunity to love Southland Tales unconditionally, with my whole heart and Gen X soul. I thought I found that in being lucky enough to see Kelly’s vision in all its majesty before pretty much anyone else other than folks who saw it on the festival circuit AND have my name and words of frightening eloquence forever be a part of a nifty, long-awaited and culturally important DVD/Blu-Ray release.
I was excited. I’ve been blessed to have a lot of great opportunities in my life and my career, personally and professionally. This was one of them. I wanted to make the most of it, to really execute so that Arrow would be happy they’d asked me and I’d be proud of my work.
Why yes that is Booger from Revenge of the Nerds, Silent Bob and the old lady from Poltergeist
Then came nothing. I did not hear from Arrow for months, possibly even years. My contact at the company left, and I suppose I assumed that because the release of a Director’s Cut of Southland Tales was something I desperately wanted to happen, and wanted to be a part of, it obviously would be stuck in development hell forever. I’ve learned to be very pessimistic due to everything being terrible and doomed to failure. It’s maybe not the best trait.
Eventually the 158 minute Cannes Cut of Southland Tales did come out but I had no involvement with it. Other people wrote the liner notes instead of me. I’m sure they did a fine job but I was going to lay down some really righteous word jazz about Kelly’s far-out flick, really blow some squares’ minds.
I was split. On one hand I was glad that the world would finally get to see Kelly’s masterpiece. But I regretted not acting more assertively or decisively.
Having now experienced the Cannes Cut in all of its hypnotic, goofball glory I’m even more bummed because my opinion on the film morphed from fascination mixed with mortification to out and out love.
Time undoubtedly plays a role. Like Donnie Darko, Southland Tales is partially an exploration and exploitation of nostalgia, both individually and generationally. It’s a film set in the very near future that’s deeply plugged into both the uncertain present and the cozily familiar, infinitely knowable past.
It’s a boldly personal vision that resonates with me in part because Kelly and are only a year apart in age and have seemingly identical nostalgia sweet spots. Like so many members of my generation, I’m obsessed with Saturday Night Live and Southland Tales is so lousy with Not Ready for Prime Time Players that you half expect to see Lorne Michaels’ name in the opening credits.
In addition to Mad TV funnyman Will Sasso, the Cannes Cut of Southland Tales features Nora Dunn, Amy Poehler, Jon Lovitz, Cheri Oteri and Janeane Garafalo. It’s casting that understands the way Saturday Night Live has penetrated our collective subconscious and seeped into our dream world along with plenty of other pop culture detritus, from poems we all learned in school to pop ditties about teen horniness.
As someone deep in the process of writing an exhaustive tome about movies about movies, it thrilled me to no end that Southland Tales belongs in The Fractured Mirror because it is, among other things, a unique and unforgettable exploration of the unique process of an action star eager to break into directing with a movie that will hopefully not only have a very satisfying third act but also act as a work of prophecy foreseeing the end of the world.
In a revelatory performance, Dwayne Johnson plays the aforementioned 20 million dollar a movie matinee idol, Boxer Santeros. As an actor and ubiquitous public personality, we KNOW Johnson. He got rich and world famous playing the same cocky badass in movie after movie.
The genius of Johnson’s performance here, and it is a work of genius, is that it’s like nothing Johnson has done before or since. Johnson contains multitudes here. He’s out of his goddamn mind in a way that presents itself as an ultimate form of sanity, of truth, of revelation.
He’s an amnesiac, cockeyed, prophet/messiah with the body language of The Simpsons’ Montgomery Burns on an Adderall binge. He’s at once an impressive, imposing figure and a loony spiritual seeker who does not and cannot understand what is happening and his role in it.
A fan besotted with Boxer tricks the Samson-sized sap into thinking that he is inside his own screenplay. He’s too hopelessly frazzled and confused to be able to tell the difference between the real world and the world of his cinematic fiction.
Boxer cowrote the screenplay with his mistress Krysta Lynn Kapowski (Sarah Michelle Gellar), an adult film actress looking to segue her fame as a porn star into pretty much EVERYTHING ELSE: reality shows and pop music and a REALLY good tasting energy drink.
They have fun!
Gellar would never be this funny and fearless and raunchy again. It’s a masterpiece of brazen self-parody that anticipates the rise of Kim Kardashian, another tiny ball of ambition who transformed being notorious for having sex on tape into a lucrative multi-media empire.
When Justin Timberlake signed on to play narrator Private Pilot Abilene he had only recently traded in clean cut teen pop super-stardom for acting. So it took real balls for him to play an Iraq war veteran who isn’t just grizzled and a little bit off; he’s positively demonic, a feral, beer-swilling man-beast with the ability to break the fourth wall and lip-sync The Killers’ “All These Things That I've Done” in perhaps the film’s most audacious and iconic sequence.
Southland Tales is as brilliant and deliberate in its use of music as Donnie Darko, if not more so. Moby’s ambient score establishes just the right note of icy loneliness, synthetic despair and confusion while the movie derives much of its raw emotion from the ragged glory of songs like Blur’s exhausted, world weary and transcendent “Tender.”
Kelly’s follow-up to Donnie Darko takes place in a then-future 2008 deeply informed by the issues and concerns of the era in which the film was made, most notably civil liberties, the PATRIOT Act and President George W. Bush.
Today W. is universally beloved as a Santa Claus figure, with a whole lot of Mr. Rogers and Bob Ross thrown in for good measure but back then he was actually considered suspect in some circles just because he started wars that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
A nuclear detonation in Texas has led to the rise of US-IDent, an agency that’s like a cross between The Terminator’s SKYNET and the worst parts of the Bush administration.
#Squadgoals
The right-wing powers that be, which include the requisite W. Figure in the form of Holmes Osborne’ squinty-faced, funny-talking Southern senator Bobby Frost, are at war with the Neo-Marxists, a scruffy outlaw band we are told represent the last vestiges of the Democratic Party.
Republicans have long accused the most tepid and milquetoast Democrats of being bomb-throwing, American-hating bolsheviks. In Southland Tales that hysterical accusation finally has an element of truth in it.
The Cannes Cut of Southland Tales affords it more time and space to really stretch out and work as a mood piece and a waking dream more than a conventional narrative.
Southland Tales may be the most 2007 movie in existence but it also feels like a cult oddity out of time. Southland Tales aspires to profundity and high art but it’s also proudly, unabashedly goofy, a symphony of silliness that could only come from one man.
It’s a satire and Phillip K. Dick science fiction and a head film galloping madly towards the apocalypse in a terrible hurry.
Kelly reportedly plans to revive Southland Tales as a sequel or a series. That sounds insane. In that respect it’s true to the spirit of Kelly’s poorly received labor of love. If a sequel ever comes about I’ll be first in line opening day and if they need someone to write the liner notes for the eventual DVD release, I’d be happy to help with that as well.
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