C+ | An LA slacker unearths a conspiracy in his hunt for a missing neighbor. Directed by David Robert Mitchell Starring Andrew Garfield Review by Jon Kissel |
Having imitated John Carpenter 80’s horror movies in his breakout hit It Follows, David Robert Mitchell’s highly anticipated, repeatedly delayed, and ultimately failing Under the Silver Lake takes Los Angeles detective stories as its inspiration. The one guy on the hunt for answers can be found in films as varied as Inherent Vice, The Long Goodbye, or Mulholland Dr, all of which are evoked here with sets or scenery or moods. Like It Follows, however, a good start slowly crumbles under a foundation not broad enough to support the weight Mitchell builds atop it. By hinting at so many other movies that are better than itself, Under the Silver Lake can’t help but draw unflattering comparisons. The plots of these kinds of dense private-eye films rarely make sense, but with enough cinematic power or thematic consistency, it doesn’t matter. With as loose and scattered as this film is, it matters.
Mitchell’s protagonist Sam, undoubtedly named for genre archetype Sam Spade, is played by a grungy Andrew Garfield, a character who stinks right now because of a skunk but probably smells pretty bad most of the time. He’s a slacker with a few days left before he’s evicted from his apartment, and we never see him do anything to forestall this event. Sam’s time is consumed with his latent paranoia, brought to the surface by an interrupted encounter with the mysterious Sarah (Riley Keough), a neighbor and Marilyn Monroe-devotee based on how she speaks and dresses. When she disappears and is later presumed dead, Sam is desperate to know what happened and his fellow LA paranoiacs are happy to point him in the right direction.
We recently discussed Inherent Vice and that film’s plot isn’t so much more complex than this one. What’s uniting everything that happens in that PTA work is a thread about the end of an optimistic period and its exploitation by powerful interests, so the particulars of coked-out dentists and secret Nazi’s are less important than those characters being pawns in the overarching game. Under the Silver Lake shares in its conspiratorial leanings, but it has little of Inherent Vice’s unifying theme, or any unifying theme. There’s appealing stuff here, like the poisonous appeal of nostalgia, the commercialization of art, the rich’s disdain for everyone else, the need for punk kids to be punched square in the balls, etc, but it’s disconnected from each other and spreading out all that stuff and more is a scattershot approach that dilutes the film into some weak tea. Without one recurring idea, the film becomes a sequence of scenes. Some of them are great, sure, but we’re watching a movie, not a youtube playlist.
The biggest knock against Under the Silver Lake is that I recognize that there’s a deep well of content here, but I can’t find the motivation to get to the bottom of it. As far as complex puzzles that I recognize but can’t get exorcised over, we’re not quite in Primer territory, as this is much better made film with moments of greatness, but we’re close. Mitchell’s made a watchable film with some strong performances, including an oddly threatening one from Garfield, that stays cold and distant even as its final scenes make a play for emotional heft. Do I want it buried under the earth and sealed in concrete? I don’t, but I’m likely never to think about it again, so it may as well be. C+
We recently discussed Inherent Vice and that film’s plot isn’t so much more complex than this one. What’s uniting everything that happens in that PTA work is a thread about the end of an optimistic period and its exploitation by powerful interests, so the particulars of coked-out dentists and secret Nazi’s are less important than those characters being pawns in the overarching game. Under the Silver Lake shares in its conspiratorial leanings, but it has little of Inherent Vice’s unifying theme, or any unifying theme. There’s appealing stuff here, like the poisonous appeal of nostalgia, the commercialization of art, the rich’s disdain for everyone else, the need for punk kids to be punched square in the balls, etc, but it’s disconnected from each other and spreading out all that stuff and more is a scattershot approach that dilutes the film into some weak tea. Without one recurring idea, the film becomes a sequence of scenes. Some of them are great, sure, but we’re watching a movie, not a youtube playlist.
The biggest knock against Under the Silver Lake is that I recognize that there’s a deep well of content here, but I can’t find the motivation to get to the bottom of it. As far as complex puzzles that I recognize but can’t get exorcised over, we’re not quite in Primer territory, as this is much better made film with moments of greatness, but we’re close. Mitchell’s made a watchable film with some strong performances, including an oddly threatening one from Garfield, that stays cold and distant even as its final scenes make a play for emotional heft. Do I want it buried under the earth and sealed in concrete? I don’t, but I’m likely never to think about it again, so it may as well be. C+
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