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.
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