Southland Tales: C

For some unknowable reason, two years ago, Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales captured the cultural zeitgeist—or, rather, some form of it. It was the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, and Kelly’s film was premiering there, for the first time. Ever. Plus, it was a hot ticket: the follow-up to his first film Donnie Darko—a movie that captured both critics and a cult following. Turns out that this second movie, though, got no such happy welcoming; it was, frankly, critically decimated and accordingly blew up a whole storm of negative media (which in its way has a sick fascination, now that the film is available to the masses on DVD). Each and every one of us can now go home and answer for ourselves the question: was it really all that bad?

The answer, I can most objectively report, is yes. Yes, yes, yes. Kelly—who wrote, directed, and produced this sprawling 144-minute tale—sinks so far into his delusions that he not only loses the audience, it would seem as if he loses himself, too. In this cross-cutting story of various inhabitants of Venice Beach, there isn’t even one frame that has a coherent value in a larger scheme of things. Characters walk, run, and shoot at each other. And, on paper, the world they inhabit would seem to give their actions an extra dimension of propulsive satirical weight. (In Tales, for our “amusement”…or to “inform” us…or something, Kelly creates a post-apocalyptic world in which terrorism has run so rampant as to mutate the American government into some Orwellian cast-off in order to combat it). But nothing ever quite works. No, let me clarify: nothing ever quite makes sense.

At the center of the whole thing is Boxer Santoros (Dwayne Johnson), an amnesiac movie star with ties to a Republican politician currently running for President. Spinning around him are Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar looking a bit like she’s wandered onto the wrong set), a porn star struggling to diversify her business model, Roland Taverner (Sean William Scott), a police officer who may or may not have a twin brother who may or may not control the fate of the entire world, and Private Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake, narrating in a Southern accent so undeniably hollow it about drives your ears to jump right off your head). Each of them, at one point or another, ends up propelling the interests of the two opposing organizations at the heart of the film’s plot: USIDent—a massive informational complex manned by the government to spy on any and every one—and the Neo-Marxist movement, which even in the “near-future” is still pretty much like it always was. But it’s not like it matters, anyway. Though things keep being plotted and intended and re-organized and revealed, the story never clears up.

In fact, Kelly shuffles through so many styles in his filmmaking, so quickly, you may experience a bit of nausea. Alternately, he’s making a science fiction epic, a parody of said epic, a black comedy, a Crash-style drama set in Lower California, and a musical. (About that last one: at one point in Tales, Justin Timberlake goes on a drug trip, and in such a stupor, Kelly stages a sequence crafted around The Killer’s “All The Things I’ve Done,” starting with their ecstatic bridge (you know the one: I’ve got soul/But I’m not a soldier…) and it’s the most powerful moment of the entire movie.)

It would seem as though the director has some schizophrenia, and it would seem as though it seeps into the movie itself. Most nagging of all, though, is that he has a real knack for pulling you through, hook-line-and-sinker, minute-by-minute. Never once, really, was I bored. Just irritated—even, when, in the last hour, the movie seems to cop from some sub-par Mulholland Drive and become about characters writing a movie that’s real but set in the past (since, shocker!, they’re all from the future). You want to know the real truth at the heart of Southland Tales? It isn’t that our world could devolve into a big, demoralizing blob. No, it’s that, in this day and age, someone can still perform a truly aggravating magic trick: Richard Kelly will, in a no time, make your whole day disappear—his movie along with it.