The Road to Nowhere

The Road to Nowhere was made by the acclaimed indie director Monte Hellman (Hellman made several renowned micro-budget westerns with Jack Nicholson in the late sixties – they are like oaters directed by Antonioni; he made a couple more highly regarded pictures, most famously Two Lane Blacktop and Cockfigher with Warren Oates and, then, dropped out of sight after directing a slasher exploitation film in 1989 – The Road to Nowhere is the 79 year old director’s first picture in 21 years.). The movie is similar to Hellman’s other serious films: it is extremely elliptical, enigmatic, and beautifully shot and edited. Early in the picture, someone is pitching a film to be called “The Road to Nowhere” – “it’s a noir,” the young man says. The producer responds: “Don’t ever use that word again.” But The Road to Nowhere is, in fact, a noir – distinctly related to Double Indemnity and other pictures of that sort. Like Hellman’s other movies, the film uses genre conventions to address metaphysical concerns about identity, the aesthetics of commercial film, and erotic obsession. Apparently, a young woman and her powerful boyfriend, possibly a corrupt politician, stage their own murder-suicide, intending to vanish to the Caribbean and Rome. An investigative journalist who writes a muckraking blog seems to have uncovered the fraud – which somehow involved a huge payment of insurance proceeds. With a hillbilly insurance investigator, the journalist tries to unmask the lovers, who have separated and are living abroad incognito. A film maker, modeled on (a much younger) Monte Hellman, buys the rights to the story and, with a scriptwriter friend, makes a film about the politician and girlfriend. The uncanny, if profoundly improbably, twist,is that the filmmaker unwittingly casts the politiian’s girlfriend, in the role that she played in real life. (My summary is vastly more clear than the film which is shot in a series of beautiful, but unresolved, fragmentary scenes). It’s probably a mistake to judge the plot by standards involving verisimilitude – if you want to know why the fugitive girl would ever become involved in shooting a story about her own crime, this is not the movie for you. Rather, Hellman uses the film to explore gloomy notions about the inevitability of guilt, about obsession that restages crimes, as well as erotic desires, about the nature of representation. Curiously, the movie is very luxuriant in detail and has a highly realistic texture – shot largely near the Smoky Mountains in North Carolina, the picture has a reserved, elegant, and beautiful eye for small towns, murky landscapes, lakes full of half-submerged trees, mists drifting on green mountain sides. The picture is also very witty about film making and the film industry. As a bonus, we get famous scenes from The Lady Eve, The Spirit of the Bee Hive, and The Seventh Seal – the director watches these films on DVD in bed with his beautiful leading lady. There’s a country-folk sound track that I enjoyed – although a lot of critics seem to despise the music. Hellman is a real original – a downhome, quintessentially American director who makes European-style art house films in rural Red-State settings. People either hate this movie or love it. I loved it. (As a special feature on the DVD disc, there’s an underlit, poorly recorded, Q & A session at the Nashville Film Festival where the movie premiered – it’s pathetic and heartbreaking; Hellman worked all his life to make films that are uniquely his own vision, but this picture, which European and South American critics proclaimed one of the best of 2010, made less than five-thousand dollars when shown for a couple weeks at an obscure art house in NYC; no one in this country has seen this film, and no one will ever see it).