Road to Nowhere

Monte Hellman made some idiosyncratic and memorable genre films fifty years ago, most notably two films starring the great Warren Oates, The Shooting, a minimalist Western, and the road movie, Two-Lane Blacktop.  Hellman's films are eccentrically paced, highly elliptical in their narrative technique, and made on minuscule budgets and they were ignored when released.  Hellman continued to direct, but his films, all financially unsuccessful, followed at exponentially increasing intervals until, at last, he ceased making movies for 22 years.  Quentin Tarantino revived Hellman's career by hiring him to produce Reservoir Dogs -- initially, Tarantino had tapped Hellman to direct the film.  In 2010, Hellman's last film, The Road to Nowhere, was released.  Predictably, Hellman's fans proclaimed the film a masterpiece; critics less invested in Hellman's cult following, generally, dismissed the movie as overly confusing and unnecessarily mannered -- as usual, the general public paid no attention at all and, after a week playing in a four or five theaters in a couple major cities, The Road to Nowhere vanished.  The movie is moody and self-effacing -- the initial titles proclaim that the film is the product of some other director, a figure who turns out to be a character in the movie.  Although the picture contains sequences of great beauty, there is considerably less to the film, I think, than meets the eye.  The premise of The Road to Nowhere is absurd to the point that the plot must be accepted as a Borgesian contrivance, a vehicle for expressing certain metaphysical notions about truth and reality.  A beautiful young woman and a crooked politician scheme to steal 100 million dollars from the State of North Carolina -- the nature of their criminal enterprise is never explained although it seems to have something to do with land rights, the Great Smoky Mountains, and a reservoir.  The two conspirators enlist the assistance of a terminally ill cop (one of those Hollywood fatal illnesses that doesn't debilitate the victim) to fake their own deaths in a plane crash.  The woman separates from the politician for reasons that are also obscure, flees to Rome, and there makes a low-budget horror movie, appearing as a joke.  Back in Hollywood, a film maker and his screenwriter buddy are developing a big-budget movie about the theft of the 100 million dollars and the mysterious deaths of the politician and the girl.  The film maker sees a DVD-disk audition of the girl, believes her to be perfect for the part, and, without knowing her true identity, casts her in the same role that she played in real lift -- that is, as the femme fatale involved with the crooked politician in the scheme to steal a fortune and, then, fake her own death.  The director goes to Rome to interview the woman and falls in love with her.  She is smitten by the director herself and so, implausibly agrees to play the lead character in the movie about the criminal scheme -- presumably, she is blinded by love.  As the filming progresses, the director loses control of his feelings and alienates his writer and crew by focusing on the beautiful young actress to the exclusion of other concerns.  One element of the film, and, probably, its most personal aspect, is the story of how the director becomes increasingly obsessed with his leading lady to the detriment of his move -- this subplot seems to be semi-autobiographical:  a closing title informs us that the film is dedicated the actress who appeared with Warren Oates in Two Lane Black Top.  A plucky lady reporter and a hillbilly hired as an advisor on the film (the man was working as a gardener at the director's Hollywood mansion) discover that the actress is, in fact, the woman who actually contrived the real theft (and feigned suicides) on which the movie is based.  People get drunk, guns are brandished, and history repeats itself -- more people are killed mirroring the deaths that occurred when the crime was originally committed.  Hellman shoots this unpromising material in his trademark style -- that is, he employs long and uncommunicative takes, very little dialogue and much moody silence, deferring plot whenever possible to atmosphere and landscape.  The film is confusing, particularly since the crooked politician is played by the same actor in both the scenes showing the crime being plotted and the sequences showing the film within the film being made -- so we see the gangster-like corrupt politician hiding out in some Latin American country, perhaps Cuba, inexplicably accompanied by Fabio Testi (a self-indulgent touch -- Teste was the spaghetti-western actor in Hellman's last Western, a picture made in Italy called China 9, Liberty 37), the same player (Cliff de Young) also playing the role of the crooked politico in the scenes showing the love-besotted director filming the movie.  The picture has lots of insider information about movies and film-making -- it is replete with "inside" jokes and film allusions -- and the parts of The Road to Nowhere showing the technology of film making on location are very interesting.  It's ultimately impossible to work out the plot -- Hellman stages two versions of the plane crash, both of them very effective, leading the viewer to ask "which is real".  And this question illustrates, in a fundamental way, Hellman's point -- of course, neither is real; the film is fictional, it's all made-up.  But this seems to be a rather trivial point on which to construct the elaborate labyrinth of a movie of this sort.  At this late stage, do we really need to be reminded that movies are made-up, that what we are seeing on the screen is not reality?  The viewer is left with the sense that the genre material from which the plot is constructed is so formulaic and stale that Hellman distrusted his story and decided to conceal the uninteresting crime narrative in layers and layers of post-modern mystification and allusion -- we get no less than three extended clips for films admired by the movie's (fictional) director:  The Lady Eve, The Spirit of the Beehive, and, finally, the appearance of Death on the stony beach from The Seventh Seal, those images from Bergman used as a harbinger for the film's bloody climax.  The Road to Nowhere is an interesting failure -- a paradoxical structure that is all inside without any outside at all.  The humid-looking North Carolina locations are spectacular and impart an eerie, sodden eloquence to the proceedings and a couple of expensive-looking lodges in the Great Smoky Mountains have something of the ambience of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining -- these places are just as much characters as the figures sleepwalking through the gloomy plot.  I'm conflicted about this film -- some of its emotional effects are subtle and profound and there is much to admire in the eloquent, if taciturn, way that the film is designed.  In some respects, the movie seems to be an attempt to adapt some of the rebarbative ideas of Jean-Luc Godard (it's full of Godard-like aphorisms) into a format that might be appealing to audiences raised on TV crime dramas and sit-coms.  But the picture also has something of the feeling of a self-indulgent home-movie -- all of Hellman's children seem to be credited as producers and the director seems to have been allowed to throw anything into the movie that he liked; the picture pauses for melancholy love scenes and musical performances completely discontinuous with the film in which they are embedded.  In the end, the riddle posed by the movie doesn't seem worth solving.