Southland Tales

Review By: Michael Dance
michaelmdance@gmail.com

Southland Tales feels very much like a product of the paranoia and insecurity that Americans felt in the days following 9/11, as written by an unhinged sci-fi writer like Philip K. Dick.

It takes the events of that day as its starting point and revises what came afterward like a Worst Case Scenario of civilian fear: Muslims smuggle a nuke through the Mexican border and set it off in Texas. President Bush reinstates the draft. The government takes control of the Internet as a "safety" measure. It's now 2008, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan both rage on. Veterans return home and sit on rooftops with automatic rifles to keep the peace. Oh, and we're running out of fuel.

One of the veterans is Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake). He explains the above paragraph and tells us what we're about to see is a chronicle of how the world ends.

Frankly, I think that setup is pretty cool. A revised-history positing of What Could Have Happened, and maybe What Still Might Happen, and showing us how it all brings about the End Times? That sort of thing can bring out the gigantic sci-fi geek in me. I just wish Richard Kelly, the writer-director of this and Donnie Darko, had bothered to make any sense out of the story. Maybe if we knew what was going on we could've had a chance to enjoy it.

Let me try to walk you through the various plot strands. Dismissing the film solely on the basis that it bites off more than it can chew would be to ignore the many areas where it does succeed.

Everything takes place in the L.A. area in the days leading up to July 4th. Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson) is a movie star married to the daughter (Mandy Moore) of Senator Bobby Frost (Holmes Osborne), who's related to Nana Mae Frost (Miranda Richardson), who oversees USIDent, the government-backed company controlling the internet. However, recently Santaros woke up in the desert with amnesia, and has been shacking up with Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), a porn star.

Meanwhile, war veteran Ronald Taverner (Seann William Scott) is impersonating his twin brother, Roland Taverner, a cop, in order to carry out a plan by a group of Venice Beach neo-Marxists who want to destroy USIDent. They're collecting severed fingers to try to rig the next presidential election (to be voted by fingerprint) and are using footage of Santaros and Now's affair to blackmail Senator Frost. (Actually, I have no idea which was Ronald and which was Roland, but as it turns out, it matters very little.)

And then there's Baron Von Westphalen (Wallace Shawn), a scientist from abroad who always travels around with an entourage that includes Bai Ling, Beth Grant, and a creepy short old lady. Westphalen has come to unveil his new invention: Fluid Karma, ...