My Year of Flops (23 page)

The Great Gazoo Theory explains the totality of Brando's career from
Missouri Breaks
on. I expected it to sweep film scholarship. In my hubris, I predicted that it would be at least as influential as the auteur theory, if not more so, since it prominently involved a minor supporting character from the
Flintstones
universe.

The Great Gazoo worked overtime on the set of 1996's
The Island Of Dr. Moreau
. No sane human being could have made Marlon Brando take a role that required him to cover his face in white pancake makeup because he has “allergies to the sun” (a line that, due to Brando's slurred diction, sounds uncannily like, “I have an alligator for a son,” which actually makes sense within the context of the film), use an ice bucket for a hat, speak in the effete diction of a
Masterpiece Theatre
host, travel everywhere with a tiny sidekick who looks like a fetus that just barely survived an abortion, and spend his last few moments alive tickling the ivories while trying to explain the differences between Schoenberg and Gershwin to terrifying sub-human beasties.

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 couldn'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.