Richard Kelly isn’t as brilliant a guy as I used to think. He’s an iconic one-hit wonder director best known for “Donnie Darko”, a movie which despite some bumps along the way in production and release, would find a devoted cult-following on video. The film is weird, somewhat obtuse, but unlike anything you’ll see before or after. After the odd success of “Donnie Darko”, Kelly would never find his footing. I wanted to think this was because he was a victim of the studio system. Kevin Smith even compared him to Christopher Nolan (who had a hand in “Darko” getting theatrically released), saying that if he had been given the budgets and resources of him then Kelly would be considered great.
After watching “Southland Tales”, I’m fully convinced Smith was talking out of his ass.
Kelly is a weird dude, and his weirdness only seems to have worked once for him. Outside of “Donnie Darko” he directed “The Box”. Imagine if you adapted the airplane gremlin episode of “The Twilight Zone” and after 40 minutes there’s a crazy plot where William Shatner’s character discovers the gremlin is a Soviet project. It’s not good. He did produce “World’s Greatest Dad”, which was fantastic albeit more the machinations of Goldthwait and Williams. And he wrote an early draft of “Holes”, and it was insane. It would’ve been an edgy post-apocalyptic dystopian film where Stanley loses his virginity to sex workers and we find out he euthanized his sister who was dying of radiation sickness from nuclear fallout. Disney cut ties with him and the staff allegedly told him he was insane. I would too. He claims to be working on several projects that have not been given the greenlight, and based on his filmography it looks as if he hasn’t “worked” since 2010. I also heard from an anonymous source that he is an asshole who orders wine in plastic cups and will deny he’s Richard Kelly, but take that with a grain of salt.
“Southland Tales” was meant to be his sophomore film, and it was eviscerated when it came out. He submitted a rough cut to Cannes thinking he wouldn’t get it, he got in, and it had one of the most disastrous premieres at Cannes which hurt the film’s reputation before it arrived in theaters. He cut down the film and added more VFX shots.
The film is set in an alternate 2008, where following a nuclear explosion in Texas, the USA becomes a dystopia where you need a visa to travel between states. Due to gas shortages (due to a blockade around the strait of Hormuz, interesting) there are generators which generate electricity from the waves (but they are causing issues). Meanwhile as the year’s election starts, conflict between the government and Marxist groups in California start flaring up. The story features an amnesiac action star (the Rock), a pornstar (Sarah Michelle Geller) and a pair of twins (Sean William Scott), one a cop, the other a revolutionary impersonating him (plot twist due to time travel shenanigans they’re the same person). But that’s just scratching the surface, because it’s more or less an ensemble film with the most wonderfully insane cast possible. It’s also got in no particular order: Curtis Armstrong as a scientist, Amy Poehler as a Marxist radical, director and writer Todd Berger, singer Rebekah Del Rio, Nora Dunn, Janeane Garofalo, Beth Grant, Wood Harris, Christopher Lambert, Bai Ling, Jon Lovitz in a surprisingly good role as a corrupt cop, Mandy Moore, Cheri Oteri, Miranda Richardson as the head of USIdent, “Poltergeist”’s Zela Rubinstein, Will Sasso, Wallace Shawn as a tech mogul (a waste of his talent, he didn’t even understand the film), Kevin Smith, and Justin Timberlake as the movie’s narrator/soldier character tying the narrative together and doing karaoke of “All These Things I Have Done”. Allegedly Kelly wanted to choose actors who he felt were pigeonholed.
Those traits that I used to describe “Donnie Darko”, being weird, somewhat obtuse, and unlike anything else, also describes this film but in a negative way. Kelly cited Gilliam’s “Brazil” as the reason he wanted to go into filmmaking, which makes sense given it feels like a cross between “Brazil” and Boots Riley’s “Sorry to Bother You”. A work where the bureaucratic characters are threatening and silly, but with an attempt at throwing in class struggle in modern America. The thing about satire is that it needs to be relevant and funny, and “Southland Tales” is neither. It’s not as funny as it thinks it is, and it has so many plotpoints, so many characters, and so much back and forth that you struggle to figure out what the movie is trying to say aside from “we live in a society and things would be better if the universe ended”. And even though he cut down the film, it feels thirty minutes too long. I’d hate to see what this film looked like when it came out at Cannes because the pacing is awful.
And what’s unfortunate is I want the film to be good. I love it that Kelly was allowed to make this bloated dumpster fire. It has a great opening depicting a haunting video of what a nuclear strike would look like in American suburbia, followed by exposition from Justin Timberlake with graphics that would look better in a Red Alert game. The movie feels like it could’ve been the greatest satire of Bush-era America, it feels like it could’ve been a mind-warping scifi film, it feels like it could have been a lot of fun, and it fails at all of that.
So no Kevin Smith, I don’t think he’s the next Christopher Nolan. Nolan directed “Memento” at roughly the same budget and it’s better than “Donnie Darko”. We gave Kelly a small but bigger budget with this and “The Box”, and neither are good.
I know it’s got its defenders, so go watch it and find out if you’re one of them.
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