Road to Nowhere

As 'Road to Nowhere' begins, pre-production is underway on a movie project about a notorious murder case involving an absconded embezzler, faked accidents and substitute corpses. The director is seeking a lead actress to play the crime's femme fatale - and his search soon unearths an uncanny double of the villainous vamp, whose only previous credit is an 'exploitation' movie. Coincidentally her character is called Velma - which also happens to be the name of the duplicitous missing showgirl in Raymond Chandler's 'Farewell, My Lovely'. After two-thirds of the film is wasted on long shots of characters tying their shoelaces, watching nail polish dry and rehearsing inconsequential dialog, the actress embarks on a tepid love affair with the film's director, which results in some unexplained melodramatic discord and a violent conclusion.

Although film-within-a-film concepts have been used previously, as in Truffaut's 'Day For Night' and David Lynch's 'Inland Empire', a disciplined director armed with a coherent screenplay should be able to conjure fresh life from the old dog. Unfortunately 'Road To Nowhere' never provides any useful information about the original crime or those involved, nor does it ever clarify various intrigues amongst the film crew. Director Hellman justifies all the heavy-handed movie references and opaque mysteries by claiming he prefers surreal narratives - but his excuse is fraudulent. This isn't surrealism - it's just dull story-telling - or more accurately, no story-telling.

Monte Hellman remains one of America's greatest living filmmakers, director of metaphysical classics like TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (1971), arguably the ultimate American Road Movie, COCKFIGHTER (1974) and a handful of others. Like the masterful Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice (whose classic THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE Hellman gives a nod to in ROAD TO NOWHERE), it's something of a crime that Hellman has directed as few films as he has. So there's great reason to celebrate with the arrival of ROAD TO NOWHERE, his first full feature in over 20 years.

Hellman being who he is, ROAD TO NOWHERE is as dense, poetic and mysterious as anything he's made since probably THE SHOOTING in 1968. In fact, his new film is likely his most challenging ever -- but that shouldn't put you off. On the surface, it's the story of a real-life murder-suicide connected to a Southern politician -- a mystery which gets inextricably entangled with the making of a film about the tragedy directed by a moody, obsessive filmmaker (Tygh Runyan, who also played the moody, obsessive Stanley Kubrick in Hellman's "Stanley's Girlfriend") and starring a beautiful, opaque actress (Shannyn Sossamon, in easily her strongest and most rewarding performance to date). Add to this an almost infinite rogue's gallery of characters including veteran actors Cliff De Young and John Diehl, a wry extended cameo from Italian pulp cinema icon Fabio Testi (from Hellman's CHINA 9, LIBERTY 37) -- and you have the strangest Hall of Mirrors this side of THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI.

If you struggle to make "sense" of the plot, you'll probably miss the point -- since one of the major themes that emerges in ROAD TO NOWHERE is the impossibility of ever making sense of anything. (Hence the title: the Road leads Nowhere, but that shouldn't stop you from taking the journey.) Hellman uses a similar narrative strategy as in his classic TWO-LANE BLACKTOP where about halfway through the story the actual race stops mattering. In ROAD TO NOWHERE, the question of who committed the murder (or whether there was a murder at all) slowly drifts away in a Sargasso Sea of false leads, flashbacks and unanswered questions. What's left is Hellman's portrait of monstrous artistic obsession and some of his most intense and erotically-charged filmmaking ever, played out in long, lingering scenes between Sossamon and Runyan. There's also a bit of M.C. Escher here, like walking up a staircase only to find yourself at the bottom of another staircase, and another ...

If you're looking for an easy ride, then you should probably look elsewhere. But if you want to wander off-road, into the mysterious and inexplicable Zone (to quote from Tarkovsky's STALKER) where nothing is as it seems -- then Monte Hellman's ROAD TO NOWHERE is for you.

There is a strange phenomenon with Monte Hellman, as well as for example Jean-Luc Godard: each of their films are immediately classics of cinema. "Road to Nowhere", as well as "Film Socialism" the same year, are films far in advance of their times, that everyone knows, more or less consciously, are as necessary as a play by Shakespeare or Beckett, or a composition by Bach or Schoenberg. The desynchronizing between the release and the public recognition wouldn't be so important, if the author, in the meantime, were allowed to make his work and offer us many other cinematic diamonds. But the result is the rarity of Monte Hellman's films, and it's like humanity is depriving itself from emotional and artistic resources it needs so much. "Road to Nowhere" is one of the major films of the decade, related to works by Pierre Corneille ("Illusion"), Luigi Pirandello ("Six Characters in Search of an Author"), Vincente Minnelli ("The Bad and the Beautiful") or Federico Fellini ("8½").

This was among the most exciting news in recent years, a new Monte Hellman film out of nowhere. In the pipeline for some time but released without any hooplah or major headlines, this much was at least proper for a man who made incognito some of the unique films of the American underground: Ride in the Whirlwind, The Shooting, Two-Lane Blacktop, Cockfighter.

But this one intrigued in a different way; gone but always remembered is the great Warren Oates, gone the mute drifters and brooding alienation of that time, but it would not be hackwork for hire, a re-shoot or mere work assignment, this one promised to be a dark personal vision like he hadn't been given the opportunity to direct in a long time.

So gone is Blacktop and Oates, this is a new thing for Hellman. But old in terms of cinema. It is the old trope of a film about a film, filtered through film noir and French New Wave. Lynch, pundits assert.

So one layer is a film about the makings of the film we are watching, referencing a life in movies and around movie sets that Hellman knows too well. Material deliberately chosen to be pulpy and reflecting movie plots that we know from noir is the backbone, a story of illicit love and suicide and behind it political intrigue and stolen money, presumably real events that our visionary filmmaker is fighting to turn into a movie.

Another layer is that story interspersed throughout as a film-within and gradually being shaped into the film being shot. But is it? Or is something more sinister afoot and only masquerading as our film? The idea: where does one dream end and the next begin, and is the space where one bleeds into the other reality or fiction.

The mechanisms that generate images are well sketched: desire, codified as our actress and referencing the femme fatale - another woman playing a role - and film noir dynamics, and the self perceiving itself separate, here very directly our filmmaker selectively framing a part of real life as a moving illusion.

The downside is not that it's slow and muddled as reported by some viewers. The downside is that since Hellman's day we've had several filmmakers probe and abstract deeper. We've had Lynch. This is not as complex or dangerous as believes to be. The machinery is never less than obvious. And occasionally as hamfisted as a camera being mistaken by police for a gun.

Hellman shoots this like it's going to be his crowning achievement. It's not, mostly because in this specific niche compete the most adventurous filmmakers of our time. This is not and has never been Hellman's natural space. He can't help but disappoint. But it's a new Hellman film and in a new direction and that's something to get excited for these days, right?

Opening medium shot: Shannyn Sossamon is sitting on a bed with her back to the headboard.The camera begins to move s-l-o-w-l-y toward a closeup of her face against a backdrop of silence. 3 minutes elapse as we watch her left hand move toward her face. She is holding a hair dryer. She turns it on. It blows in her face. During the next 2-3 minutes we watch as she moves the hair dryer closer to her face. We hear the motor purr. As this soporific scene concludes it sets the stage for a 120+ minute film that defies description. We soon learn that the story is about the shooting of a movie. Mademoiselle Sossamon has been chosen for the lead in this 'movie within a movie' She tells the Director she is 'not an actress' but he wants her anyway. I don't blame him..she's gorgeous and mysterious, perfect for a part that is the centerpiece of this convoluted, incomprehensible, maddening movie. As we watch various scenes of the director 'shooting his movie,' we become more confused regarding the storyline. When the director needs a retake, we watch him shoot the same scene over three times. More than likely the film editor went mad attempting to splice the scenes together to make a coherent story. Rather than give up, he spliced the scenes at random, collected his check and vanished. I commend him for having the courage to allow his name be listed in the credits. This movie was an endurance test. After the first 30 minutes, I took a bathroom break and noticed that at least half the audience had left, presumably in time to get their money back. I am aware there is an audience for this type of movie who enjoy obscure plots populated with ill defined characters. I'll acknowledge that Director Monte Hellman has style, but I'm unable to describe it. If money is not an object, go see this movie. But don't delay. I suspect the DVD is imminent.