There’s a brief, throwaway moment in David Robert Mitchell‘s “Under the Silver Lake,” a film composed of two-hours and 20-minutes of brief, throwaway moments, when Andrew Garfield, playing tousled, shambling everymanchild Sam, wakes up on his sofa with the pages of a comic book stuck to his hand. He shakes it loose blearily, and we catch a glimpse of the cover: “The Amazing Spider-Man.” “Hoho!” the savvy audience member thinks, “Andrew Garfield starred in that movie! Amusing!”
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Or at least, we’re meant to, but this little flourish, nested in the film’s synthetic bouquet of flourishes, points to the vague, indefinable problem that sits alongside the movie’s emphatic, definable ones like low-level sexism and shallowness: The references always refer to ever-so-slightly the wrong thing, or to the right thing in the wrong way. It made a lot of money and got a sequel, but Garfield’s unloved stint as Spider-Man is already, at best, an unsatisfying one-line footnote in the massive tome of pop cultural history. And so the giddy little dopamine hit we expect as a reward when we make oblique, meta connections or decode hidden messages never comes. And that’s an issue for a film which takes the decoding of pop cultural signifiers as its Grail quest.
In a Hollywood Babylon-style LA of popping, sunshiney colors (Mike Gioulakis‘ cinematography is reliably scrumptious throughout), fringed with palm trees slathered in Lost Dog posters, Sam is on the brink of eviction. He lies to his mother that he’s working but actually, he spends his days reading a local comic book/zine called “Under The Silver Lake,” trying to work out what word the parrot next door keeps squawking (definitely “Yanny,” not “Laurel”) and spying on his neighbors. It’s a bit “Rear Window” but if you don’t get the Hitchcock allusion here, don’t worry, there’ll be “Vertigo“-style dolly zooms and extended following sequences, enormous blasts of Disasterpeace‘s excellent Bernard Herrmann-esque scoring, haphazardly applied, and if all else fails, a shot of a memorial plinth in an LA cemetery emblazoned with the word “Hitchcock.”
Anyway, into this listless, unexamined life strolls Sarah (Riley Keough), in a white bikini and cheap floppy hat and over the course of one blissful evening together, which only ends when her flatmates return in the company of a guy dressed as a pirate (who never even meets the damn parrot), Sam falls hard. Yet the following day her apartment is empty, except for a mysterious symbol on the wall and a shoebox full of knick-knacks. Sam resolves to track her down, and becomes obsessed by the idea that there are clues to her whereabouts, and to the secrets of the universe, hidden in plain sight everywhere, as part of a global conspiracy of the rich and powerful to keep down the poor and insignificant like himself. So begins his tiresome tumble down a rabbit hole of numerology, cartography, and local lore, populated with skimpily drawn, skimpily clad sexually available young women who appear to enjoy awarding themselves to men in packs of three.
It is a film that lends itself to epigrammatic summations. It’s sunshine noir with a congenital hoarding problem; “The Long Goodbye” for the Ritalin generation; the plastic, knockoff version of “Inherent Vice,” absent Paul Thomas Anderson‘s flair for stitching his scenes together with invisible, phantom thread. It’s “Southland Tales” made in a world where “Southland Tales” already exists and has been reappraised, as though Mitchell is hoping his bloated folly will somehow be able to leapfrog over the wilderness years as a punchline and get straight to cult object status. The film’s surface pleasures are such that he might even succeed.
But it won’t be because the film has any depth, direction or anything to say about the world. In the short story “Symbols and Signs” by Vladimir Nabokov, there’s a young man confined to a sanitarium for an ailment described as “referential mania”: he sees significance in everything around him, from the shape of a leaf to the fall of a coat in a store window. It’s a pretty accurate analog of Sam’s obsessive pursuit of hidden patterns, only the Nabokov story ends with the young man’s parents being informed that he’s attempted suicide. The problem with believing that everything means something is that it amounts to the same thing as nothing meaning anything, just noisier. And that’s a nihilism that underpins all the busy-ness of “Under the Silver Lake” which trundles from incident to incident and from one luscious LA location to another, piecing clues to other clues and stringing gadgets and gizmos and motifs like Christmas lights, never once stopping to give us a reason to care.
Mitchell’s breakout, “It Follows” was a deliciously stylish little indie horror, and though it foreshadowed his lack of narrative discipline, the restrictions of its budget and resources meant that it couldn’t stray too far into the yonder. But with “Under the Silver Lake” Mitchell saw all the lights on the long highway to success turn green, and in the full flush of all that indulged freedom, put the top down, turned up the radio and roared off into the LA evening, forgetting that he didn’t have anywhere to go. [C-]
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