SOUTHLAND TALES
Directed by Richard Kelly. Starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake. Now available on DVD.

What happens when my irresistible urge to champion wildly ambitious but critically despised cinematic trainwrecks runs smack-dab into an immovable object like Southland Tales, writer/director Richard Kelly’s follow-up to his cult hit Donnie Darko? I’m sorry to report that my very forgiving critical attitude did not survive the crash. If you’re looking to fix a precise time of death, I think it expired at the moment where Wallace Shawn, wearing lipstick, eyeshadow, an exquisitely pomaded forelock, and an embroidered cape, French-kisses Bai Ling during a massive party aboard a “megazeppelin” flying over Los Angeles. The rule still holds true: no good movie has ever had a zeppelin in it.
I had high hopes for Southland Tales, even after suffering all the way through Domino, the noisy, overstuffed, incoherent Keira Knightley bounty-hunter movie that Kelly wrote the script for, even after hearing that it begins with “Chapter Four” (Kelly having dumped the movie’s backstory into a trio of graphic novels that came out two years ago), even after a disastrous screening the 2006 Cannes Film Festival turned it into the international film world’s favourite objet de jeer. A sci-fi comedy about an amnesiac actor, an ambitious porn star, an L.A. cop and his identical twin brother, neo-Marxist activists, citizen surveillance, and a tear in the fabric of the universe, all taking place in a crazy-quilt alternate version of present-day California—there’s no reason why it couldn’t work, right? The premise of Donnie Darko looked pretty dubious too, and it never got a theatrical release either.
And indeed, Southland Tales’ obsessions aren’t too far removed from Donnie Darko’s: once again, you have a character who gains the power to either save the world or destroy it after stepping through a rift in the space-time continuum, and once again you have a piece of writing—in this case, a screenplay co-authored by actor/political son-in-law Boxer Santaros (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) and porn star/queen of all media Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar)—that seems not just to contain all the clues necessary to understand what is happening but to have predicted it as well. There’s a similar fondness for unexpected musical interludes and mindbending scientific paradoxes, images of characters falling unconscious, a dislike of prissy, prunefaced middle-aged women, a belief in acts of self-sacrifice. Donnie Darko had Sparkle Motion; Southland Tales has Fluid Karma.
What Southland Tales doesn’t have is a centre—a grounded character whose journey the audience can invest in emotionally like Jake Gyllenhaal in Donnie Darko, whose overmedicated, teen-angsty struggle to piece together his life’s cosmic mysteries had surprising poignancy. True, Seann William Scott really seems to be giving everything he’s got in his dual role as twins Ronald and Roland Taverner, but the characters are frustratingly passive—I think Scott must get knocked unconscious at least six times in this movie. And The Rock continues to prove himself as an unexpectedly resourceful and graceful actor for an ex-wrestler. Despite his enormous physical presence, his performances are always human-scaled, vulnerable, self-deprecating. I say this sincerely: The Rock is every bit as good an actor as Johnny Depp. In Southland Tales, he does this adorably frightened flutter of his fingertips every time something strange happens—it reminded me of Cary Grant’s nervous whinny in Bringing Up Baby.
But everyone else in Southland Tales is a sub-Pynchonian caricature with a goofy name, a ridiculous hairstyle, an ugly costume, and an incomprehensible agenda. Almost every performance in the film is the result of a stuntcasting gamble that doesn’t quite pay off: Jon Lovitz as a racist, trigger-happy L.A. cop? Christopher Lambert as some kind of weapons dealer who operates out of an ice cream truck? Kevin Smith, completely unrecognizable as a grey-bearded government scientist in camo gear? Saturday Night Live vets Amy Poehler, Nora Dunn and Cheri Oteri as Marxist terrorists? Did Kelly stand in front of Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant one night and hand out parts to whichever actors happened to be eating there that night? Or did he pull their names randomly out of a hat, like Secret Santa time at the office?
So many questions to answer: Is this the first movie to count Gus Van Sant’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues as a stylistic influence? Why does Mandy Moore—the star of Southland Tales and American Dreamz—hate America? And what kind of director cuts half an hour out of his movie after it gets booed at Cannes, but leaves in the scene where Wallace Shawn French-kisses Bai Ling?