Under the Silver Lake

It’s great to have goals, to dream big and to push yourself. Within reason. What was it that guy who used to host America’s Top 40 used to say? “Keep reaching for the stars.” People forget, though, that he also urged caution. I believe the entire message was, “Keep reaching for the stars, but don’t be a fucking moron about it.”

We all need that guy in our lives. For everyone who urges us to push ourselves, we need someone brave enough to hold us back when our wishes are dumbass shit. Sometimes your best friend is not the guy who encourages you when you want to meet the hot girl crouched by the dumpster behind Long John Silver’s. The best friend is the thoughtful fellow, the one who says, “That’s not a hot girl, it’s a rabid mastiff and you’re really drunk.”

This guy has to be such a good friend that you listen, no matter how alluring whatever that thing is as it tears into a human-head-sized hunk of coagulated grease.

David Robert Mitchell, director and writer of Under the Silver Lake, needs a good best friend. He needs that person who can pull him aside and talk him down, convince him that his script really is a dog and if he goes forward it will rip his fucking face off. Sometimes, you should reach for closer stars.

Under the Silver Lake is a lot of things, probably way too many things, but at its heart it’s an overcooked hipster nod to Hollywood-adjacent living where attractive young people sit idle while waiting to be discovered. The movie is buried under a smog of LA’s history. There is the famous sign looming over it, and film-school-student nods to Hitchcock in scenes of voyeurism, and most obnoxiously obvious, some kids draping themselves over his tombstone. Apartments are cluttered with old movie posters. There is the tabloid sensationalism of stories like the Black Dahlia Killer and the Night Stalker and urban legends on the periphery, mentioned but poorly used. This is a city full of underemployed storytellers piling up useless legends.

The movie wants to be a noir about a man searching for a woman who has mysteriously disappeared. There are prostitution, drugs, enigmatic women and dozens of people who just can’t seem to give a straight answer or take Garfield where he asks to go. So, just like pretty much everything Hammett and Chandler wrote about, and in the same physical space, mostly under street lights, only with far less brevity. Unlike Chandler, Mitchell has no deep connection or insight into LA. His city is the one already documented on the Tumblr pages of scenesters. I also felt like Mitchell was channeling Hammett’s weirdest fucking book, “The Dain Curse” which dabbles with cults, as this movie ultimately does, as well as drugs and surreal visions.

Mitchell also wishes he were David Lynch, or at least have the ability to haunt the way Lynch does. He is closer to it than most directors who think Lynch is just weird, but he doesn’t have the gift of connectivity, of making the weirdness linger. Instead, Under the Silver Lake has off moments that just drift away without exploration or depth. Where Mulholland Drive gave me a lasting case of melancholy for the cruelty, rot and sadness of Hollywood, Under the Silver Lake left me cold, like it had nothing to say about what it showed.

Silver Lake the place, for those who don’t know, is the Williamsburg of LA, a formerly fancy, then rundown, area east of Hollywood. It got cheap enough to draw youngsters and artists, which led to gentrification, coffee shops, indie rock and more places selling artisanal pickles than tacos. It’s exactly where asshole screenwriters move to from the middle of the country and wonder why nobody is writing about this amazing place with boutiques selling vintage jeans.

Under the Silver Lake is told through the eyes of a detached and aimless hipster named Sam (Andrew Garfield), a guy who doesn’t really care that he’s being evicted or his car repo’ed, all the while he has money for everything else. That’s the detached LA way, I guess. It’s hard to get excited. Anyway, Sam is supposed to be an anti-hero. The problem is he is not interesting enough to be interesting. He is also usually just there when things happen, rather than the instigator or the motivator. That might be fun for a screenwriter to write, but it’s fucking tiresome to watch.

Sam does or does not have a job. Maybe he’s an actor or writer, or somehow another of those people just burning fuel while sitting at the curb while the world zooms by. He fills his time floating from one pop-up party to the next, on rooftops or in cemeteries, having casual sex or being invited to. The bonus to that is the girls who offer are very generous about showing their boobs, and I like boobs.

After catching Sam spying on her, Sarah (Riley Keough) invites him to hang out and watch an old movie. He thinks he’s in love, but the next morning, she’s gone, her apartment cleared out. She was last seen with a man dressed as a pirate. Yes, I’m fucking serious about the pirate. And no, he is not relevant to the story. Sort of like the car that went off the pier in Chandler’s “The Big Sleep.”

Garfield’s character sleepwalks through the mystery, mostly along a shady, wooded narrow path by a stream next to Griffith Park. Holy shit, is Mitchell in love with that little path, as though he thinks he’s the first guy to discover it. In his search, he tries to solve numerical puzzles, find the hidden messages in songs and follow a treasure map from a 1970s cereal box while wandering amongst hipster gatherings asking women if they know his former neighbor or what happened to her. These activities may or may not be related, but I sure as hell am not going to sit through ore viewings to figure it out. This thing’s like a 2000-piece jigsaw puzzle of spilt milk. Yeah, it’s a lot of pieces, but in the end you wonder, "Why the fuck did I bother?"

Sam hangs out at LA's The Last Book Store, even though we never see him reading. He meets a Hollywood conspiracy theorist / ‘zine writer. He almost fucks a girl who covers herself in balloons and gives people pins to pop them. He dances to bad old pop music in caves beneath a cemetery, skinnydips, dallies with a hooker, hangs out with Topher Grace. In the movie’s most cringeworthy scene, he journeys to what I assume is supposed to be Phil Spector’s castle on a hill in Alhambra where a man called the “Songwriter” in really, really bad old-age prosthetics gives a soliloquy about how everything Sam has taken from music was a lie, that it has always been garbage written for the masses.

This is before Sam bludgeons the Songwriter to death with Kurt Cobain’s guitar. Or does he? Perhaps it was a drug-fueled dream. And yet, he later has the old man’s pistol.

Ultimately, Sam solves a mystery of such massive inconsequence and worthlessness that the movie collapses in on itself. I thought, “I sat here for 139 minutes for this?” The rich are faking their own deaths so that they can go hide in underground palaces with concubines and wait for their “ascension,” when they will be converted into pure joyous energy. This fucking pissed me off because it’s such a fucking copout for the all the clues and meanderings, but also because it’s a wonderful concept completely wasted.

The idea I love is asking what is the point of amassing wealth. Why do it when you are still bound to this shitty earth and all of our shitty mundanities? Even the richest man on the planet still has to brush his teeth and sleep and piss and poop. These things we can’t escape. The rich don’t have a better Internet or better porn. They don’t get to see better movies. Wealth does not guarantee better taste. But Mitchell has no interest in exploring that, or really exploring much of anything He mostly just really wants to let you know he is aware of all this shit. But he can’t really tell us in any profound way what he thinks of it. To him, the conclusions is just an easy out, a way to get out from under the mountain of crap he's piled up.

The movie also annoyed me because Mitchell is trying so damn hard to make a sprawling and precise epic when he just doesn’t have the resources. There are matte backgrounds as shitty as you’d see behind a high school musical. Particularly, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the labyrinth of underground tunnels and the Songwriter’s castle, or similarly amateurish work, in bad pornos. There are continuity errors that stick out in a movie that wants to be so detailed oriented, such as when Sam puts his wallet away only moments later to be holding a wad of cash.

Mitchell has ambitions that outpace his skills or his resources. He’s reaching for the stars, but against that Top 40 guy's warnings, he’s being a fucking moron. A good friend should have told him this before he got too far. It's shouldn't be me because I have never, ever been a good friend to anyone. Two Fingers for Under the Silver Lake.