AJ O'Leary

about • portfolio • essays • reviews • contact

Movie Review: “Southland Tales: The Cannes Cut” (2006; Cannes Cut publicly released in 2020)

15 years later, the opportunity to spend 20 extra minutes in Richard Kelly’s mind is no less strange

Minor spoilers follow.

There are pieces of pop culture history that should be experienced for no other reason than the fact that they exist, and fellow humans somehow created it. Metal Machine Music, Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven, The Last Movie, Ecco the Dolphin, Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants: these are all deeply curious pieces of art that, whether you happen to think they’re good or bad, will leave you thinking above anything else: “Wow, this exists. Okay!”

Southland Tales is one such creation. The second feature film by Donnie Darko creator Richard Kelly, it is truly a testament to what can go so wrong and still so fascinatingly right when a directly is briefly tagged as a genius and given a blank check to do as they please.

The year is 2008 (which, given that the film was released in 2006, was meant to have a “five minutes into the future…” feel to it). A Fourth of July nuclear attack in Texas turns the United States into a police state, even by real-world standards; emboldened by the rise of ever-present surveillance, Republican Party presidential nominee Bobby Frost is locked into a battle for the nation’s soul against a basically nonexistent Democratic ticket and, for some reason, Neo-Marxists that count a performance artist played by Amy Poehler among their acolytes.

Our hero, in so much as one exists in this world, is amnesiac ‘actor with ties to the Republican Party’ Boxer Santaros (The Rock); his mistress is a clairvoyant porn star named Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar); there’s also a guy who’s masquerading as a particularly problematic police officer to bring down the system (Seann William Scott); the dude who says ‘Inconceivable!’ in The Princess Bride plays an Elon Musk-esque villain; and the whole thing is a loose adaptation of the Book of Revelation.

Oh, yeah, did I mention Justin Timberlake narrates the whole thing and stars in a musical number halfway through the film set to The Killers' All These Things That I've Done?

I could go on for another 30 paragraphs about how bizarre it is that Southland Tales even exists, but I have a review to finish, so I’ll get to the point: this film was a lot to take in when it came out. In a world that hadn’t yet begun to unravel in a manner similar to Terrence McKenna’s pseudoscientific theory of novelty, it was especially bizarre - so much so that it got a director riding the ‘auteur’ wave and free rein to take whatever budget and cast he pleased booed at Cannes in what Roger Ebert claimed was one of the worst thrashings a film had ever received on the festival circuit. Richard Kelly’s career immediately fell into a very deep well at just 31 years old, never to be pulled back out; it’s now been 15 years and he’s only directed one other feature film.

I first watched Southland Tales in 2014, when a friend attending film school in Los Angeles suggested it to me as a movie so bizarre it had to be seen to be believed. I was immediately pulled in by the fact that it’s one of the purest expressions of unbridled mania I’ve ever seen put to film. You can never quite tell whether the actors think the whole thing’s a joke on the level of The Room or not, but either way, The Rock puts on what still stands as his the most inspired performance of his career, with nervous finger twitches that would put someone going outside in a Midwestern winter to shame and lines as ridiculous as “I’m a pimp - and pimps don’t commit suicide!” spoken with an earnestness usually reserved for wedding vows or a commencement speech. Along the way, Kelly managed to squeeze the strangest acting performances each of the motley supporting crew of not-quite-A-listers ever entered into their respective filmographies.

In the years since my first viewing, as the country I call home suffered through the presidency of a game show host and endured a series of increasingly improbable events, some involving other B-list celebrities from the 1980s and 90s, I’ve come to realize that Southland Tales is the perfect reflection of America’s id. It’s loud, odd, and vulgar. The story it’s trying to tell is as well engineered as a writing prompt scrawled out by someone who just woke up in the dead of night and is trying their hardest to get all the thoughts out before they forget them. And yet, through it all, Southland Tales still sells a prevailing message currently being vindicated by the world around us: an obsession with militarization and materialism can be the source of a country’s darkly comic chaos and undoing.

I don’t see the infamous “Cannes cut”, not available to the public until recently but the version I watched for the purposes of this review, as any great about-face for Southland Tales’ saga as a coherent film; it cuts out some strange parts, adds others, and adds a little context that makes a few interactions make slightly more sense here and there, but in the end, it’s still the same weird mess I’ve found myself revisiting and strangely enjoying numerous times just because I’m amazed it even exists.

Overall Score: 4 / 5

If you liked this review, let me know.

Click here to view my other reviews.