Review: UNDER THE SILVER LAKE

   

     After It Follows, David Mitchell was the hot, indie director to watch. When it was announced that his next film would be a film noir mystery set in modern day Los Angeles, I was excited. That sounded fairly interesting and fairly cool. Mitchell had made a teenage film (The Myth of the American Sleepover) about, well, teenagers doing teenage things like getting drunk and staying out late and falling in love, then he followed that up with a weird horror film (It Follows) about a sexually transmitted disease that was perhaps the exact opposite of what you would think of when imagining a horror film about a sexually transmitted disease (Cabin Fever, this was not). So to now make a film noir feature seemed to cement the fact that Mitchell was definitely a filmmaker to watch. He zagged when you thought he would zig, and he would always come up with something fresh and new. He was going to be a fucking star, huge, a legend. And then the film noir film, Under the Silver Lake, premiered at Cannes earlier this year and all of the air was let out of the balloon. The critics that reviewed it didn't hate it nor love it. They did the worst possible thing: they didn't care about it. It was meant to be forgotten. And now, seven months later, it kind of seems like it has been.
     Under the Silver Lake was deemed too long, too weird, too strange, with flashes of brilliance but ultimately a let down of a film with grand ideas and a bold vision that went nowhere. The studio was set to release it stateside in the summer then pushed it to December and now it's set to be released sometime in April of 2019. I wouldn't be surprised if it never gets released in theaters, if it's the type of film that's decided is unreleasable and simply sent straight to DVD or a streaming site. You might see it pop up one night at 1 AM on Showtime and vaguely remember that, yeah, it's that movie by David Mitchell starring Andrew Garfield and Elvis Presley's granddaughter that never came out. What happened? What went wrong?
     Surprising or not, I'm here to say that Under the Silver Lake is a great film, one of the best I've seen this year. It's also exactly what everyone has said it is: it's long, sure, it's weird, sure, it doesn't make a ton of sense, sure, and most people will fucking hate it's guts. But I was engrossed, captivated, intrigued, and entertained for its entire running time. Maybe it just plays into what I like about films and what others loathe. Or maybe I'm just a sucker for anything that takes me on a bizarre journey that's like nothing you've ever experienced before, or rarely have, if ever. The film reminded me of how it felt reading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. That's a book, sure, but the experience of reading it is more akin to taking a new drug for the first time and experiencing something beyond reading mere words or a rudimentary story. Under the Silver Lake is more of an experience than a film. It's not technically a straight mystery film. It's not even technically a straight film, although it does have a primary mystery that's solved amidst so many other tangents unresolved. Ultimately what it is is a film that wraps you up in it's dream like fog and doesn't let go for two hours and fifteen minutes. You don't know where it's going. Every new scene is like opening a new door in Willy Wonka's factory. What the fuck is this? Where are we? Who are these people and strange things? Often it doesn't even matter because it's so thrilling, oft-putting, beautiful, entertaining, and new that you're just enjoying the ride.
     Andrew Garfield plays a typical, L.A. slacker who somehow has a car, apartment, friends, and an affinity to attract beautiful women yet doesn't have a job, prospects, great hygiene, or sense. Early on we find him watching a topless neighbor through binoculars. When his mom calls him he's pretending that he's at work. The world he inhabits is modern day Los Angeles, but there's always something strange on the margins. When he gets coffee at a local coffee shop, a worker is trying to clean off a spray painted message on the front window that reads: "Beware the Dog Killer." When a new, blonde beauty played by Riley Keough shows up at his apartment complex pool, the plot kicks in. Who is she? What's her deal? Things then get weird. And more weird. And while the main mystery of the film is this blonde beauty, there's also the eye-patch pirate, the escort service, the Jesus rock band, the woman-watching pervert with a drone, the underground bunker, the hobo code, and more. The film is so stuffed to the brim with oddities that it often feels like the script wasn’t written with a story or plot in mind, that it just came about when Mitchell wrote down a string of “cool" ideas he dreamt up on random days. And while some of the ideas and scenes work more than others (the song writer scene is just bad), the film is filled with a lot of beautiful imagery and absorbing sequences. I loved the dance scene in the cavernous, cave nightclub on old school music night when REM's "What's the Frequency Kenneth?" is playing. And the naked, owl-masked serial killer that moves like a ballerina with a butcher knife is both frightening and very cool. I guess it's basically to say that this movie is fucking nuts. It deals with secret codes for secret societies but doesn't ever fully make sense or reveal itself to be smart or profound. But it's very interesting, fresh, and kinetically alive. Garfield gives a great performance and is the type of protagonist you'll gladly follow down the rabbit hole with. The big question is: will the viewer go down the rabbit hole as well? The answer so far is no, and that's a shame, as it's nice to see an independent filmmaker finally get the cash to make a big, grand, bonkers vision come alive. Bravo, you strange mother fucker. ***1/2