To save themselves from the threat of
eviction from an ethereal post-financial collapse Detroit, single-mother Billy (Christina Hendricks) and her son Bones
(Iain de Caestecker) must both
resort to extreme measures in order to find money to protect themselves. Billy reluctantly takes a job in a macabre
horror/burlesque club where performers enact elaborate self-harm performance
pieces under the stewardship of sinister and lecherous Dave (Ben Mendelsohn). Meanwhile Bones and
his friend Rat (Saoirse Ronan) get
hunted by the local bully – imaginatively named ‘Bully’ (Matt Smith) – whilst trying to repeal a curse put on the town
connected to a abandoned town flooded after an artificial river was created.
(Huh?)
Yet even though Billy and Bones are literally
related and similarly trying to survive desperate circumstances, Lost River is basically two completely separate
stories loosely based on survival from poverty and escaping threatening power
hungry villains – they are like the final intertwining narrative arcs of a TV
drama coming together in the final episode.
What might appear dreamy and David Lynch-esque to some viewers to me
just felt like a bunch of stuff was happening on screen with little evidence of
a finished shooting script.
If you approach Lost River as two
separate narratives depicting two separate versions of despair and poverty then
it is easier to make judgments on the two stories. Put bluntly, the story with Billy and the
horror burlesque club is compelling and dark and visually interesting, whereas
the storyline with Bones and the magic river and a cursed elderly mute and the
bully named Bully with a sadistic love of scissors is just plain awful.
The allusion of a post-recession Detroit
‘submerged’ underwater is an obvious enough metaphor about financial
mismanagement and the catastrophic effects of capitalism. But to include a level of magic realism about
a curse that needs to be lifted, accompanied with some of the worst dialogue I
have ever heard at the cinema from a supposedly art-house film (sorry,
Saoirse), is just crass beyond belief.
Increasingly as I was watching Lost River, I couldn’t shake a nagging
thought from my head: That all the most
striking imagery was clearly filmed by the second unit. The cutaways and pans across the urban sprawl
of bankrupt Detroit were hypnotizing and poignant, whereas the main scenes with
Gosling behind the camera lacked discipline and flare.
There is no denying that Matt Smith is
an amazing actor, yet could surely have done a better job with a more
experienced voice behind the camera.
There is a moment of intense violence that gets edited to a series of
jump cuts with Smith wailing filmed in various close ups that made the whole
audience in the cinema I watched it in laugh out loud (those who hadn’t
literally fallen asleep…though to be fair it was during the day and they were
old.) And an unexpected dance scene with
Mendelsohn in a latter scene in the movie is so outrageous that I wondered
whether Gosling was just taking the piss after all…
However, I did not hate this movie. There were enough beautiful shots to lure me
in and keep me entertained, and Billy’s story (what should have been the whole
movie) was just dark and ludicrous enough to enjoy. Yet where Gosling’s other divisive movie
suggested that only God forgives, it seems that most audiences and critics
might not be so kind…
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