Movie Review - Southland Tales

Director: Richard Kelly
Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake, Mandy Moore

The long awaited follow-up to writer/director Richard Kelly’s 2001 cult hit Donnie Darko, Southland Tales is freakishly similar it its odd little ways. No doubt many were left scratching their heads after viewing his debut film and, well, not much has changed in terms of narrative clarity in his latest offering. But damn is it a good movie.

Featuring an insanely random cast of actors, Southland Tales will not only blow your mind, but physically beat it repeatedly just for kicks. It is an amazing exhibition of an unnerving dystopian world, in this case Los Angeles post-nuclear attack, where everything is unsettlingly distorted and disjointed from the norm. Dwayne Johnson’s character Boxer Santaros leads us tentatively through this unfamiliar society, where pop culture has reached an almost unbelievably, oversaturated degree, and media is king. It plays out like an experiment in filmmaking; a visual explosion featuring wildly over-exaggerated characters who posses similarly exaggerated character traits. To describe the film as a ‘mess’ would not necessarily be a bad thing as its intentions are here in its chaos, but Hollywood traditionalists stand clear.

To outline plot in such limited space would be like attempting to catch a whale in a butterfly net, so I will leave the daunting task of a summary to IMDb. What is almost more important in this film is character. Matching the random list of actor’s names is an equally random mix of characters- a menagerie of strange beings wandering the streets of this futuristic L.A. It is a treat to watch such an eye-jarring gathering of talent sharing a screen in these circumstances- and doing it well.

After shedding 20 minutes of its originally hefty 3 hour weight following Cannes in 2006, the film is a toned down cut of Kelly’s original vision. Unaware of what was discarded to the cutting room floor, I can only speculate as to whether the additional film would have added a greater coherency or if it had simply proved to be excess baggage.

So with film number two out in the open, are we witnessing the birth of a new American auteur, whose artistic output expresses a refreshingly personal, inventive view of the world? I sure hope so.