“Looking Glass” stars Nicolas Cage and Robin Tunney as a bereaved couple who buy a shitty desert motel so as to put their past behind them. The movie spends a good deal of time playing coy about the precise nature of Cage and Tunney’s bereavement, which is annoying: as if anyone watching isn’t clever enough to know that “movie couple dealing with a tragedy” equals “recently dead kid.” Soon after they arrive in their new desert home, Cage’s character begins to notice certain odd goings-on in the motel. His investigation into the motel’s general oddness leads him to the discovery of a one-way mirror, a looking glass, through which he can watch his oblivious clientele as they go about their business (he mostly uses it to spy on them having sex). Marc Blucas rounds out the core cast as the local sheriff, who, like everything else in this movie, is weird in a non-specific kind of way.
The film is directed by the astonishingly prolific TV director Tim Hunter — this is a guy who’s directed episodes of “Twin Peaks,” “Beverly Hills, 90210,” “Homicide: Life on the Street,” “CSI,” “Carnivàle,” “House,” “Deadwood,” “Breaking Bad,” “Mad Men,” “Hannibal,” “Riverdale,” and many more. His expertise isn’t lost on “Looking Glass,” which has a decent premise, a creepy setting, and a sneakily radical ending. Ultimately, though, Hunter’s televisual and cinematic impulses are at odds: while much of his filmmaking style is influenced by contemporary auteurist cinema, there’s a procedural feel to “Looking Glass,” as though Hunter’s primary concern is prodding the audience along toward a big twist ending, rather than relishing the journey toward a cathartic (or not!) conclusion.
“Looking Glass” practically begs you, from minute one, to imagine what would have been, had it been directed by a more confident auteur. Its trendy, electronic score (not to mention the motel setting) is constantly referencing “The Neon Demon,” while its visual style, settings and dialogue are ripped from any number of Coen Brothers films. One wonders what the Coens would have done with the movie’s voyeurism subplot, how they’d have shot the looking glass scenes, how they’d have elevated the movie’s themes of grief and responsibility, how they’d have rewritten the film’s less-than-good southern townspeople dialogue. On the same note, one imagines that Nicolas Winding Refn would have dispensed with the film’s worse exposition scenes, simultaneously elevating its distinct atmosphere and visual style with his signature, assured directorial visual sense.
Instead, “Looking Glass” is a hybrid Coen-pastiche and wacky Nic Cage B-movie. The influence of films like “Blood Simple” can especially be felt in its wordless opening and closing moments. The film is full of that low-rent, southern-twanged dialogue associated with Coen films (and films that aspire to Coen-likeness): at one point, a random shop owner delivers the following monologue to Cage: “You find you get a lot of ne’er do wells around your place? I got a lot of friends in this town. We can take care of that. Me and my boys? We can take care of anything in this town.” I’m fairly certain that we never see this character again.
But then there’s also kooky sequences like the one where Nic Cage dances to electro-pop music; it’s in these moments that Cage takes full authorship of the movie. And when Cage has the reins, things go properly off the rails. In a would-be routine investigation scene, Cage all of the sudden seems to be playing an insane person. Cage’s performance influences how the movie is shot and cut together; the interrogation scene has more unnecessary jump-cuts than Logan Paul’s latest culturally insensitive vlog.
Of the film’s supporting cast, only Robin Tunney truly holds her own against Cage. She’s simultaneously tough and vulnerable, even when her character is saying some truly dumb stuff (as everyone in this movie must at one point or another).
Marc Blucas is given a tougher job; his character undergoes some jarring shifts in tone and attitude as the film progresses. There’s evidently some tonal confusion on Blucas’s part, and his performance never really comes together. He’s an interesting actor — you get the sense that he could do good work with a better script and more rigorous direction. The fact that he’s playing against Nicolas Cage for the entirety of “Looking Glass” doesn’t help matters — you can feel the Cage insanity infecting what might otherwise be a perfectly fine affected southern performance.
And in case it’s still not clear what type of movie “Looking Glass” is? There’s a very random lesbianic dominatrix sequence which reignites Nicolas Cage’s sex drive which leads us to Nicolas Cage getting it on. And at one point there’s a pig in a pool.
It’s not good, but it’s not nothing. [C]
