Track 29

Poor Theresa Russell is once again subjected to her husband Nicholas Roeg's own unique brand of cinematic shock therapy, playing a frustrated southern belle trapped in a loveless marriage to model train fanatic Christopher Lloyd (hence the oblique title). When a disturbed young stranger wanders into town claiming to be her long-lost son, she begins to wonder if her mind has snapped, but there's much less to the film than what meets the eye. Roeg likes to mask the meaning of his scenarios behind a smokescreen of self-indulgent style, inside of which is a more-or-less conventional story struggling to get out. His collaboration here with writer Dennis Potter would seem to be a match made in heaven, but stripped of its visual and narrative razzle-dazzle devices the film emerges as little more than a perverse and uneasy mix of satire and psychodrama, with several flamboyant performances and a great mental breakdown montage, showing trains colliding and buildings collapsing, all inside Theresa Russell's pretty, mixed-up head.

I only rented out the film last night and Ive watched it three times since. Such an interesting little film and it leaves tons of questions. Its thought provoking on whether some scenes are real or some are part of Lindas (Theresa Russell) insanity.

I wasnt too keen on watching Theresa Russell or Christopher Lloyd on screen (the spanking scene was incredibly disturbing) but Gary Oldman somehow saves the film which makes it at least watchable. He was loveable all the way through as Martin.

If you love Gary Oldman, watch this. If you dont, then youll be disappointed.

4/5

Hard as it is to imagine a film starring Christopher Lloyd, along with Gary Oldman and the incredible Theresa Russell as long-lost mother and son reunited in the most unmateral way, to be unwatchable, but this one was. Her accent was so atrocious I could not get past that, fascinating as her relationship with her son--whether dream, fantasy or reality I could not figure out and soon lost any interest in deciphering--may have been.

What comes out is a jumbled, middled mess. You really can look away from a trainwreck.

The bored, lonely wife of a retirement-home physician in North Carolina dreams up an adult embodiment of the baby boy taken away from her when she was an unmarried teenager who got knocked-up at the county fair. Her husband, a train enthusiast, has no patience with his wife's melancholia and cheats on her with his lascivious nurse, while the young man/substitute son comes to represent the wife's anger and isolation. Disconnected filmmaker Nicolas Roeg predictably provides no simple solutions for our heroine, and screenwriter Dennis Potter (who would seem to be the perfect movie-companion for Roeg) merrily keeps the inscrutable scenario on a schizophrenic track. This isn't the weirdest movie to come from either Roeg or Potter--the film, in fact, is one of Roeg's more accessible entries--but very few of the details or ideas come to fruition (such as the wife always being dressed in lavender, or her fetish for cartoons and dolls). Gary Oldman, just off "Sid and Nancy", seems stuck in a revolving door of violent angst and aggression (only in a later scene at the piano does he show some charm), while Christopher Lloyd (as Henry Henry--perhaps an ancestor of Humbert Humbert) relies far too much on his rubbery facial expressions. In the lead, Theresa Russell works hard at conveying her character's inner-demons; in the vivid flashback scenes to her youth, she makes a terrific impression just by using her faraway eyes and smile. However, Russell never gets her little-girl twang quite right--her voice sounds disembodied--and her temper tantrums aren't shaped and have no comic pay-off (which is the fault of the director, who turns a blind eye). After the perverse-glossiness of something like 1986's "Blue Velvet", the scrubby ordinariness of "Track 29" is disappointing and dispiriting (it was shot by Alex Thomson, who has worked with Roeg before). Roeg, a brilliant cinematographer in his youth, gets a kinetic vibe going in the flashbacks to the fairground; however, aside from those startling early shots and some stray funny moments, "Track 29" seems to lose its way awfully soon, and the apocalyptic final act is simply a mess. *1/2 from ****

Yet another indecipherable movie from director Roeg; it plays like a puzzle that is never solved. Definitely not uninteresting, because of the unique nature of the plot, but so muddled and inconsistent (for example, a seemingly imaginary character interacts with other people as if he really existed) that it's not likely to satisfy many viewers. One or two (intentionally) funny scenes help. Extremely offbeat performance by Gary Oldman. (**)