“Under the Silver Lake”: Vertigo, this film is not, quite.
“Under the Silver Lake”, directed and written by David Robert Mitchell with filming started just before the 2016 election, seems like a take-off on Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (1958), with a bit of David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” (1986). It’s from A24 (of course), and as offered on Amazon Prime, it’s long (139 minutes) and pretentious.
The film was a bit of a hit at Cannes. But is doesn’t do as well as some of the films it seems inspired by (even Marilyn Monroe’s “Something’s Got to Give”). Actually, I’m thinking also of other mood pieces, like “The Tree of Life”, “Judas Kiss”, and the recent “Midsommar”.
Perhaps there are two problems. One is that the protagonist, or anti-hero, Sam, played by a physically fit Andrew Garfield, is a drifter and a watcher, a man unemployed and meandering aimlessly through a fantasy life in modern Los Angeles with his schizotypal fantasies because real life, with its drudgery and karma, is less interesting. Garfield himself is better than that. The other problem is often that films like this work better as road horror, where you go to a place and it turns sinister – but usually that sort of film (a “treasure hunt” plot) needs more productive protagonists to work. But whatever political correctness demands, attractive white men can fail (as they knew in 2016).
The premise is interesting enough. Sam finds an attractive young woman Sarah (Riley Keough) swimming in his apartment complex pool one night. When she disappears, he launches into his own private investigation based on a mishmash of conspiracy theories. Sam is being chased by his landlord and threatened with forceful eviction by the sheriff; in the film, his car gets repossessed. But know, in a setup of heterosexual upward affiliation, he has something to latch on to (but after having sex).
There are various elements of the plot. There is a dog killer on the loose, and a billionaire has (also) disappeared. Sam pretty soon starts putting together his own Pizzagate. (Yup, he’s the kind of person who doesn’t understand anything, whom Trump appealed to – and yet he thinks he can solve puzzles involving chess boards, bracelets from cereal boxes, and numerological clues.
He winds up on a tour of LA circuit parties (like “Booksmart”) and sure enough eventually finds what he thinks he is looking for, a coven of cheelahs and gurus, entombed, or in a little hideaway commune, in touch with the souls of old men who think they are reincarnations of Egyptian pharaohs and eternal life (and can even communicate with real telepathy, outside the Internet). The movie gets violent at times, as he hacks a guy to death in the head (like in Midsommar).
You wind up wanting to see a film like this with more likeable protagonists (diverse or not) going on productive quests. I’m all ready to see David Hogg play himself in a Marvel movie.
The music score by Disasterpeace (Richard Vreeland) echoes Bernard Herrmann deliberately, but toward the end builds an emotional climax, like you really want to hear a symphony or tone poem by him in a concert with a real philharmonic. The music deserves better material as its program.
A24 is said not to have marketed this film as hard as it usually does. It went right to video.
video capiton above: 'The film A24 didn't want you to see'
Name: “Under the Silver Lake”
Director, writer: David Robert Mitchell
Released: 2019
Format: 2.35:1
When and how viewed: Amazon Prime subscription, 2019/7/24
Length: 139
Rating: R (nudity)
Companies: A24
Link: official
Stars: ***__
(Posted: Wednesday, July 2