I tend to think it a pretty rare thing for anything good to
come from an actor deciding to take a seat behind the director’s chair, as the
results tend to be rather lackluster.
Acting and directing require very different skill sets, and often what
makes actors great is their knowledge of themselves and how they best can serve
a role, an attitude often at odds with the more universal perspective necessary
in a director. Enter Ryan Gosling with
his freshman attempt at writing and directing, Lost River. And you know
what? He has potential. This just isn’t the film in which it gets to
shine.
The film follows the lives of a family in Detroit, about to
have their house foreclosed upon and destroyed by their mortgaging bank. The story follows two divergent moneymaking
ventures by family members. First we
have Bones (played by Ian De Caestecker, whom some may recognize from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) searching for
scrap to sell, only to be hounded by the self-professed overlord of the scrap
trade, the aptly named Bully (Matt Smith, in a role about as vulgarly far
removed from The Doctor as I can imagine).
The other tale follows Billy (Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks), Bones’s mother, who begins working in the bank
manager’s club in a gore-centric form of burlesque, subjecting herself to the
discomforts of the audience’s gaze as she plays at mutilating herself for their
amusement.
Gosling has a real eye for making his scenes vibrant and
surreal, blending visual and auditory stimuli to make us question the reality
of what we’re seeing. There is clear
homage here to the works of David Lynch, the most obvious being Blue Velvet. The homage is so striking, in fact, that it
almost crosses the line into plagiarism, replicating shots and motifs with such
reverence that it feels derivative. It’s
generally normal for young directors to try to replicate the styles of their
idols, and while Gosling certainly has good taste in cinema, he tries so hard
to be David Lynch that his film loses any sense of identity.
This is further exacerbated by the fact that the film
doesn’t have much of a plot. It teases
its audience with some commentary on the predatory lending practices that led
to the housing bubble collapse, which is already an observation that has come a
few years too late, but the film goes on to not have much to say on it. Both Bones’s and Billy’s stories have their
share of bizarre visual delights and tense moments, but by the end of the film,
both of their conflicts are individually resolved, they reunite, and nothing is
really learned or gained from their experiences. The primary conflict of their housing crisis
isn’t even addressed, leaving the introductory plot thread conspicuously
dangling as they shrug and ride into the sunset. Combine this with the fact
that these actors barely have characters to play beyond the barest archetypes,
and what is an initally visually appealing movie becomes thematically and narratively
dull.
Ryan Gosling may give up on his directorial pursuits given
the negative response this film has received from critics. I for one, though, would like to see where he
can steer this creative energy. Sure,
this first film is a dud, but the problems are easy enough to fix. The biggest problem is likely Gosling’s
lackluster screenplay, but with some fresh outside material and a bit more of
an exploration into a unique visual style, he may have what it takes to
make something of himself.
Unfortunately, Lost River is
not the film that’s going to get people interested.
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