THE CANYONS C-
USA (99 mi) 2013 d: Paul
Schrader
Something of a navel-gazing flick, a film infatuated with
Los Angeles and voyeuristic window gazing at the supposed good looking people
that comprise the latest edition of overindulgent Hollywood youth culture. With a title that suggests a B-movie television
series melodrama of luridly interconnected sexual affairs by vacuous, coke
snorting, paranoid driven twentysomethings who all want to be in the sex
business, who 24 hours a day believe they are part of the beautiful people that
comprise the decadent, high-society world of Los Angeles, filling stylishly
modern but sterile apartments that appear to be sets for magazine pieces, where
what the characters that inhabit this world have in common is wretchedly
horrible acting performances, where like a bad make-up job, they all seem to be
intruding into this picture from far more inferior movies. While Schrader will forever be known as the
screenwriter for Scorsese’s monumental 70’s film Taxi
Driver (1976), he’s always been suspect as a director, where his choice of
screenwriting material from Bret Easton Ellis, the brilliant writer of American
Psycho (2000), reads like sleazy and sensationalist TV, where it’s hard to
take any of this seriously. But if the
point is to make something so awful that it actually becomes a parody of the
sleazy world that it portrays, well, it’s still D-grade material, where people
will only laugh at the damage done to Lindsay Lohan’s once promising career,
and how at 26, she is now channeling the aged, over-the-hill Gloria Swanson in
SUNSET BLVD. (1950), where you can just hear her say to herself, “I *am* big. It's the *pictures* that got small,” telling
director Schrader “All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up.” In that same picture, William Holden narrates
“Sometimes it's interesting to see just how bad bad writing can be. This promised to go the limit.” Who knew that the future would hold new
challenges in this regard?
The best things to say about the film are the exquisite
Hollywood locations, luxurious homes in the hills, and interior production
design that couldn’t be more exact, like the perfect look of a Kubrick film,
and there are some interesting camera shots by John DeFazio. But overall the film plays out like a campy
television series that accentuates good looks and gossip, where people are in
over their heads on a conceptual project that simply never comes together. While there are noirish tendencies, this
might have played better as a Black and White film noir, as it opens and closes
on still photos of old abandoned moviehouses that sit alone in a state of
decay, something of an eyesore on a desolate landscape, which may as well be
the future of each one of these beautiful people who hope to use their good
looks and sexual prowess to guide them to fame and stardom. While Lohan as the supposedly sexually uninhibited
Tara is not the real surprise, as her train wreck celebrity history as a
nonstop party girl in and out of rehab centers leaves one with low expectations
going in, the real surprise is that the awkward script is so cringeworthy and
that these actors take themselves so seriously, as there’s not an ounce of
intended humor anywhere to be seen, yet one can’t help but laugh *at* what we
are seeing, as it’s basically just a story about people talking endlessly about
themselves, where that’s all that matters in the world, nothing else, where
they’re constantly worried what others think of them, always on a high state of
alert in their paranoia about their relationships, yet they spend they’re lives
“acting,” playing nonchalant, pretending that none of this matters, where they
try to convince one another that everything’s cool even as they’re unraveling
emotionally and freaking out.
It’s not even appropriate to identify this as the world of
sleaze, as it doesn’t do justice to the picturesque meaning of the word, as one
thinks of sleaze with a certain old Hollywood charm or Russ Meyer lowgrade
style, cheap films often shot in shadowy, Black and White film noir, where it’s
a mix of lurid sex, booze, crime, tongue-in-cheek dialogue, and rampant
immorality, often peppered with unintended humor, where characters are
perceived as over the edge, or certainly willing to cross any moral line. What’s so startling about this film is just
how uninteresting everybody is, as there are only a few characters that appear
onscreen, and they are completely forgettable, even as we are watching them, as
there’s no hint of personality or screen chemistry anywhere. Perhaps most memorable is James Deen as
Christian, in real life something of a porn superstar making the crossover into
legitimate films, playing Tara’s overcontrolling boyfriend, a trust fund movie
mogul living on his father’s wealth, whose idea of fun is constantly trolling
the Internet with his iPhone in his hand, searching for interested sex partners
for himself and Tara, which he then films.
He’s a completely condescending, overstylized, and artificial character
that continually mocks anyone that so much as hints of having any emotion,
where at times he appears to be a younger apprentice version of Christian Bale
in American
Psycho. While he’s obviously just an
obnoxious, self-centered creep, Tara has left her real love interest, Ryan
(Nolan Gerard Funk) and his floundering career as a Hollywood bartender, to
live a lavish lifestyle in one of the most beautiful homes in the Hollywood
hills. An while feigning love, the two
are about as openly suspicious of one another as deathly enemies, resorting to
nefarious surveillance tactics to keep each under their watchful eye. If any of this mattered, or if there was a
spark of life anywhere on the set, there might be a movie, but it’s all lost in
a superficial glaze of Hollywood sleepwalking.
By the way, where was Nicholas Cage during the shoot? He might have provided some well-needed,
unhinged energy that is sorely missing.
