Southland Tales (2006) Review
5/10
Los Angeles in 2008, after a nuclear attack on Texas. An action star with amnesia has written a screenplay that predicts the end of the world. A police officer has a double. An adult film star is launching a talk show. There’s an energy company harvesting the ocean.
The 5 is for ambition on a scale nobody attempts and for a handful of sequences that are unlike anything else. The Timberlake musical number is among the best things anybody filmed that decade and it’s almost nothing to do with the plot.
I come out of Southland Tales exhausted, half irritated and half dazzled. I admire the nerve of it more than I enjoy most of its scenes, and I keep wanting to shake Kelly for burying a few inspired minutes under two hours of explanation.
The failure is structural and it’s specific. The film is chapters four, five and six of a six-part story, and the first three chapters were published as graphic novels. It was designed to be incomplete.
It Is the Second Half of Something
Kelly conceived it as a transmedia work, originally nine parts and later six. The first three chapters exist as graphic novels. The film contains the concluding chapters and opens on chapter four. That’s the whole problem stated as a fact instead of a criticism. An audience arriving at a cinema is being dropped into the second half of a story whose setup was sold separately, and no film survives that arrangement. The consequence is the voiceover. Justin Timberlake narrates enormous quantities of exposition because somebody has to deliver three chapters of material the audience hasn’t read, and the narration is doing structural repair work throughout. Kelly has been candid about all of it since, including that the cut he took to Cannes was unfinished, the effects were incomplete, and he wanted to say so publicly and was advised not to.
He’s also said the reception, painful as it was, left the film better off, because the recut forced decisions he had been avoiding. That’s a generous reading of the worst professional day of somebody’s life, and it’s probably true about the editing and untrue about everything else that followed.
A work that requires other work to be comprehensible has to justify that requirement from inside itself. Readers will follow a reference they don’t catch. They won’t follow a premise they were never given.
The test: can somebody who has read nothing else state what your protagonist wants by the one-third mark? If the answer is in a companion volume, the main work has a hole where its first act should be.
Transmedia fails at the seams almost every time, because each piece gets built assuming the others will carry the load, and the audience only ever buys one of them.
Cannes Was a Catastrophe and Partly Self-Inflicted
It premiered on the twenty-first of May 2006 in competition, at a hundred and sixty minutes, unfinished. Ebert described how the boos deafened him.
The decision to go is the interesting part. Kelly knew the film wasn’t ready and knew the effects were unfinished, and an in-competition invitation to Cannes isn’t a thing a second-time director declines.
What he could have done was say so from the stage. He’s said he wanted to introduce it as a work in progress and was talked out of it by people around him, and that single piece of advice cost him the picture’s reputation permanently.
He then cut about twenty minutes and released the shorter version in 2007. It took under four hundred thousand dollars against a seventeen million dollar budget. That’s close to the worst ratio of any film with this cast.
The Casting Is a Thesis
Kelly deliberately sought actors he felt had been pigeonholed, and cast them against the thing they were known for.
Dwayne Johnson plays an anxious, twitchy, frightened man with a nervous finger tic. That’s the opposite of everything he was being sold as in 2006. Seann William Scott plays two versions of a haunted cop. Sarah Michelle Gellar plays somebody with real ambition and no irony about it.
It mostly works, and it’s the film’s most underrated quality. Johnson in particular is doing something he wouldn’t be permitted to do again for a decade, and watching it now, after Kelly turned out to be right about his range, is a strange experience. The one that works completely is Timberlake, who narrates the film and appears in a single sequence, lip-syncing The Killers in a Santa Monica arcade while nurses dance behind him. It’s hypnotic, it’s entirely disconnected from the plot, and it’s the reason the film has a following.
That sequence is also the clearest evidence of what Kelly can do. It’s no dialogue, no exposition and no plot function, and it communicates exhaustion, damage and a whole national mood in about four minutes. Everything the narration spends two hours failing to establish is somehow already sitting there in those four wordless minutes of a man mouthing somebody else’s song.
That arcade number is the reason I’d sit through the rest. I’d happily watch Timberlake mouth that song on a loop and skip the narration he spends the other two hours delivering.
Casting against type is a real tool and it costs the audience an adjustment period. Budget for the friction at the start of the work instead of pretending it won’t happen.
The payoff is that a performer with something to prove will give you more than a comfortable one. Johnson had never been asked to play frightened and he’s visibly working. The corresponding risk: if the work around the performance fails, the performance goes down with it and the actor learns not to try again. That’s what happened here for most of the cast.
The Satire Was Early and Is Now Documentary
The film is set in an America with a nuclear attack behind it, permanent surveillance, an internet-fused police state, a celebrity running for office, and a media culture where an adult film star launches a talk show and is taken seriously as a commentator.
In 2006 that was read as incoherent excess. Several of those elements have since happened in some form, and the film’s reputation has improved considerably as a result. I’d be careful about the prophecy claim. Kelly was extrapolating from things visible in 2005, and being early about a trend is different from predicting it. The film’s sharpness is that it took the material seriously as a subject when nobody else did.
The film never solves tone, and that’s what loses me. Every idea arrives at the same pitch, so a joke about a talk show and a nuclear attack on Texas land identically, and I never know what I’m supposed to take seriously. After an hour of that I stop trying, and the film does nothing to win me back.
Donnie Darko had the same ingredients and solved it completely, because everything strange in that film was anchored to one frightened teenager in a specific suburb. Remove the anchor and scale the strangeness up to a country, and there’s nothing for the audience to stand on while the weather happens around them.
Two Cuts and a Reputation
The hundred and sixty minute Cannes version and the hundred and forty-four minute theatrical version tell the same story with different moods, and both are now available. Kelly prefers the longer one and has said he still finds it unsatisfying.
Watching them against each other is instructive about editing. The stories are nearly identical, and the Cannes version is hazier and dreamier, with Timberlake’s narration lighter and stranger, so the whole picture reads as a hallucination instead of as a failed thriller.
That difference is entirely tone, achieved with about sixteen minutes and a performance choice, and it changes which of the film’s problems the audience notices.
Kelly was twenty-nine when he made it. He’s directed one feature since, in 2009, and has spent fifteen years talking about a six-chapter story he was never able to finish. That’s the cost side of the ambition and it’s worth stating alongside the admiration.
He also turned down an X-Men sequel to make this. That’s the detail that completes the picture. A young director with a cult hit was offered the safe enormous job and chose the strange one, and the industry drew its conclusion within about three days of a single screening in May.
Two cuts of the same footage can produce different genres. If your work isn’t landing, the problem may be tone instead of content, and tone is cheaper to change than you expect.
For prose that means the frame, the narrator’s temperature and the order of the first three scenes. Those three levers move how everything after them is read.
On ambition: a failure at this scale ends careers, and the people who admire the swing are rarely the ones who pay for it. Admire it anyway, and know what it costs.
Should you watch Southland Tales?
Watch the Cannes cut, and watch it knowing you’re starting at chapter four. It’s the most ambitious American film of its decade and the most incoherent, and the 5 is me splitting the difference between a swing I respect and a story I mostly can’t follow. The Timberlake sequence alone justifies the two and a half hours around it, and it drives me a little crazy that Kelly never found a way to make the rest of the picture speak that same wordless language.
