By far the most interesting film I saw at NZIFF 2019 was this one. It’s impossible to really get to grips with why that’s the case without spoilers but this is a special case, where the people who’ll like this film won’t care about the spoiler and the people who won’t like it are better off knowing now what they’re in for. This is a one-star film for a lot of critics for very good reasons that I’ll get into with spoilers in the next paragraph.
The plot of the film is pretty straightforward – a slacker pseudo-detective Sam [Andrew Garfield] follows a trail of clues all over Los Angeles looking for a girl, Sarah [Riley Keough], encountering all manner of weird people in what becomes an increasingly inward-looking tangle of overlapping conspiracies. He eventually finds that she’s run off with a billionaire into a bunker where they’re hoping to ascend to another plane of existence or die of starvation while waiting. Along the way he has casual relations with a string of other beautiful women.
What’s great about the film is that it starts going down a rabbit hole of crazy interconnected conspiracy theories and commits hard to that journey. At numerous junctions it resolutely ignores the logical, sensible, even the possible, in favour of the crazy and interesting. Nor does it bother itself grabbing all the loose ends to weave them tidily into the narrative, creating the impression of a chaotic and hence very believable (albeit, totally unbelievable!) world that’s rich and detailed. All too often with films you get the impression that the world shown ends at the edge of the screen, but this film makes it clear that Sam’s story is an important threat in a gordian knot of events all happening simultaneously with different ends and objectives.
For the cineaste, this film is also 2+ hour long love letter to cinema. It is absolutely steeped in references, both overt and subtle, from the inclusion of actual movie footage to the way some shots are composed. You’d need to be Tarantino or Scorscese to spot everything, I think. One reviewer, admittedly a negative one, said that the director was drunk on the possibilities of cinema, another that the references were too on-the-nose to be enjoyable, but I really dug it.
The main problem with the film is that it’s irredeemably misogynistic. All of the women are objectified – there are an astonishing number of shots of semi and completely nude women, who in Sam’s recurring dream-motif morph into dogs. They are all ultimately used by and disposed of by the various men in the story, lacking any agency at all. They all also seem to find Sam appealing, despite his obvious signifiers as a creep with poor hygiene who’s clearly nearing rock bottom. The ultimate resolution, that Sarah has been duped into living the last six months of her life as a billionaire’s sex slave while she starves to death waiting to transcend her mortal flesh is beyond horrific.
Loving so much about the milieu, the aesthetic, etc etc, it’s very tempting to try and imagine a “redeemed” version of this film, where perhaps there aren’t any gratuitously naked women, where one (more?) of them has a bit of agency, or survives the story longer than her bare necessity in Sam’s story. The effort required, though, may be nothing more or less than “redeeming” all of cinema, because these tropes, scenes, the acceptability of the casual using-up of women – this is endemic stuff in the history of cinema, and something so deeply embedded is going to have to chart a very careful course to avoid what are fairly structural approaches, the “male gaze”.
I think the one positive spin that’s available to offset this view of women, is the deconstruction of the detective figure. Hardboiled detectives basically derive from one of three main figures, Sam Spade [Hammett], Race Williams [Daly], and Philip Marlowe [Chandler]. Each is a wish-fulfilment fantasy of one sort or another: nobody can out manoeuvre or outplay Spade, Williams is the prototypical action-hero we’ll see with varying levels of racism and sexism up until the present day, and Marlowe is just too stubborn to ever lose, the perpetual underdog. In their way, each of these archetypes is admirable, but there is literally nothing admirable about Sam. He is pathetic, and his investigations succeed only through the absurd contrivances of the conspirator who’s accidentally right. In a way, this finishes the deconstruction that Altman began in his take on The Long Goodbye (I would link to my review at first viewing, but it’s embarrassingly off-point). If women are disposable, then men are merely a total waste of oxygen.
Is this a flawed film, or is our filmic language inherently flawed? I think this film is everything it set out to be, and if that doesn’t work for you, that seems completely reasonable. I always say that criticism begins with an emotional response, and for me Under the Silver Lake was pretty much a pleasure from beginning to end. A guilty pleasure. Very guilty.
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