Thursday, September 17, 2015

Interstate 60 (2002, R)

I love breaking out this movie from time to time, just because it’s so offbeat.  It’s clunky in places – on rewatch, the scenes that are rather overwritten especially jump out – but it’s one of the most original films I’ve seen.  I don’t quite know how to classify it.  My best guess, I suppose, would be “21st-century tall tale.”

Neal is a young man in search of the answers.  All of them – he constantly questions others, himself, and his path.  Currently, he’s wrestling between his father’s desire for him – to follow in the old man’s footsteps and take a law fellowship – and his own, riskier dream – to pursue his art as a career.  When Neal wishes for answers over his birthday candles, it just so happens that he’s overheard by an elusive magical trickster named O.W. Grant.  Grant sets off a confluence of events that sends Neal on a journey of cross-country exploration and self-discovery on a highway that doesn’t strictly exist.  Along the way, as Neal looks for love and life direction in equal measure, he comes across all manner of colorful characters in imaginative small-town Americana settings.

For the most part, the story is a series of vaguely-interconnected vignettes that branch off from the throughline of Neal’s coming-of-age.  In this way, I suppose you could liken it a bit to Big Fish, but while that film is tied to the past and uses a lot of classic tall-tale and fairytale devices and imagery in its fantastical sequences, Interstate 60 is very much a modern tall tale, dreaming up contemporary folklore figures with slightly cracked abandon.  There’s Mr. Cody, the former ad man who’s broken with his previous way of life and now devotes himself to rooting out liars wherever he finds him.  There’s Laura, a young woman consumed by her quest to find the perfect sexual experience.  There’s a museum of art fraud and a Pleasure Island-style town that gives credit for its low crime rates to its legal synthetic drugs, a mysterious woman who appears in paintings, dreams, and billboards, black hearts, red spades, and a Magic 8 Ball that’s incredibly informative, but only when it wants to be.

The themes can be written a bit too directly, but I still like basically all of them.  I really enjoy the idea that “black hearts and red spades” (ie, seemingly nonexistent things) are present at the edges of our perceptions, but they can only be seen by people who know to look for them.  I also like the image of the frontier as the place for the crazies, outsiders, and misfits to go, with the riff that the U.S. lost something valuable when it ran out of frontier and that Interstate 60 is perhaps the last refuge of the wanderers.

I always enjoy James Marsden, and as Neal, he anchors the film with likeable earnestness.  The uncertain 20-something is an all-too-familiar character type, but between the writing and Marsden’s affable performance, Neal feels very specific.  Gary Oldman is fun as the puckish O.W. Grant, and Christopher Lloyd is reliably kooky as another near-mythic figure.  The film also features Amy Smart, Kurt Russell, Ann-Margaret, and a fantastic turn by Chris Cooper, Angel’s the Groosalugg has a tiny role, and Michael J. Fox is great in a brief cameo.

Warnings

Language, sexual references, drug use/references, and some thematic elements.

No comments:

Post a Comment