Under the Silver Lake

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🎙️ EPISODE 192: 08.01.19 𝚜𝚎𝚎 𝚊𝚕𝚜𝚘: 𝚖𝚢 𝚓𝚘𝚒𝚗𝚝 𝚛𝚎𝚟𝚒𝚎𝚠 𝚘𝚏 𝙳𝚁𝙼'𝚜 𝚏𝚒𝚛𝚜𝚝 𝚝𝚠𝚘 𝚖𝚘𝚟𝚒𝚎𝚜. The Big Lebowski for Millennials? Excuse the title of this review. It's meant to be provocative in a totally benign and toothless way. I believe in it to some degree, but it's the kind of overly-cutesy clickbait trope I try to avoid. That said, the mystery of this film's expulsion to V.O.D. Hell is somewhat troubling to me. And I've taken it up as a personal mission of sorts to sell it to the masses as a great film by any means necessary, because, honestly, it's easily among the Top 10 films of 2019 or 2018 or literally any other year I've been on this earth watching movies. “A Perfect Adaptation of the Best Book Tom Robbins Never Wrote,” that would be my dumb title/angle for the boomers out there. I want everybody to watch this movie.

After premiering at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, the proper theatrical opening for Under the Silver Lake was pushed back multiple times, until ultimately getting dumped with a comically limited release; odds are you watched this film on Amazon if you watched it all. Far be it from me to use this space to go off on the behind the scenes mechanisms that lead to these decisions. Most of the time, I can't be bothered thinking about the marketing end of things for two seconds. But in the case of this particular film, I'm genuinely baffled. I'm baffled to such a degree that I find it hard to separate the two. What does loving this film as much as I do REALLY mean, man? What does it say about me and MY quest? Writer-Director David Robert Mitchell is of course known for the provocative STD horror-farce, It Follows (2014), a moody, low-budget, really effective and really good movie that became an independent success and garnered a cultish second life on Netflix. It was impressive enough that A24 obviously let him do whatever the hell he wanted with his follow-up. The resulting 139-minute noir epic is a direct antithesis to that film. It's a sprawling, symphonic, and beautifully shot film with a Topher Grace peeping tom drone cameo.

You could criticize this by saying it's trying to do and say too much; that's impossible to argue actually. My counter would be that it succeeds in this, though. It chewed and fully digested the extremely large bite. One of the themes seems to be humanity's current inability to connect, largely the fault of unlimited distraction. So maybe it's fitting so many critics and focus groups couldn't or wouldn't allow the many dots to be connected. They don't deserve this movie. The supporting cast is excellent, but this daring journey works because of Andrew Garfield in a genius lead performance. It's honestly one of my favorite acting jobs (and one of my favorite characters) in recent memory. He captures an aloof sadness that seems to be a hallmark of the 21st Century. You're rooting for him in spite of the subliminal wink-wink pulsating in the undercurrent that he's most likely going to end right back where he started, if not two steps back. The long delay in releasing this film adds some (mostly meaningless) confusion to whether we should consider this a 2018 or 2019 entry. It's the kind of vague housekeeping detail that would only drive someone as obsessed as I am at chronicling minutia insane. I guess I'm the target audience for this and always have been. I might be the only one. But I'll keep searching for others.

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 191B - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 193A ⫸

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