Vouchsafed into Cannes’ main competition seems to be a shot in the arm of USA filmmaker David Robert Mitchell, his third feature UNDER THE SILVER LAKE (after inauspicious procrastination, its USA release date is slated in early 2019) is headlined by Andrew Garfield, who plays Sam, a shiftless thirty-something, piqued by the unheralded vanishing of his new neighbor Sarah (Keough), whom he just meets one day before and gets smitten with instantly, searches for clues and hidden messages to find her whereabouts, alongside falls in with urban legends, escort service, reclusive figures, religious occult and a conspiracy theory about ascension in a heteronormative City of Angels, all takes place in a topsy-turvy 4-day span and concludes with him securing a pat solution in the face of his impending eviction due to overdue rent.
For what it is worth, Mitchell delights in strewing his shaggy-dog story with numberless nods to Hollywood industry and our nerd culture (starting from its REAR WINDOW homage, Janet Gayner’s influence looms large, HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE is an obvious pointer to the plot, James Dean’s head and Nintendo Power magazine are both crucial to crack the encrypted codes, and Topher Grace and his Amazon-ordered drone is mankind’s next manmade nightmare), and carves out a mind-bending journey of Sam’s bumping and tripping with a gallimaufry of cryptic information and bizarre characters that potentially overindulges a viewer’s curiosity, at one point, a premonition creeps that the film might never be able to finish the intricate puzzle it starts.
Thankfully, Mitchell knuckles down in the final 30 minutes to expound the ultimate myth (after a far-fetched eureka moment), although somewhat bathetic, but after all, there is dry humor in a plot of a rich mogul chooses 3 nubile girls as his wives in the afterlife for eternity and leaves his real-life family bereft, absolutely recapitulates what is wrong in our patriarch, plutocratic, immortality-obsessing society, only if his ilk could all be so willing to join him in the subterranean bunkers, our earth would be a much more peaceful place.
On the other hand, the urban myths apropos of an at-large serial dog killer and an eldritch creature called Owl’s kiss are left as untied loose ends, plus what is the deal with the almighty homeless king? Violence bursts out occasionally, yes, Sam has no qualm of giving any tween prankster a working-over when he sees one, and the urge to kill erupts when he bumps into a long-in-the-tooth muso, the Songwriter (Jeremy Bobb, in heavy prosthetics), who sanctimoniously and vexingly boasts his legacy in pop music and shoots him at the drop of a hat, it serves him well to be dispatched by the allegedly Kurt Cobain’s Fender Mustang, a red-herring byplay doesn’t chime in with the droll tonality Mitchell has been adhered to with a distinct panache.
Garfield always makes for a captivating leading man, this time, melding his forthright handsomeness with a distinctive whiff of rakishness (albeit constantly getting the sideswipe of smelling bad, after the poor lad is ambushed by a skunk), and for the purpose to compensate for Mitchell’s male-gaze predilection, he has many shirtless, rear-bearing scenes to reassure us that it is okay to ogle a beautiful male bode too, also hats off to an effervescent Riley Keough, who delectably emulates Monroe’s voluptuousness with her own unique mystique.
A rambling, neo-Noir vanity project doomed to diversify audience, UNDER THE SILVER LAKE sugarcoats the stench of the cankers it aims to ridicule, with a haphazard but pleasant-on-the-eyes mystery-solving through-line, holistically frustrating yet consistently amusing, as its final logogram suggests, a cult status needs time to stew, for the time being, just keep quiet and enjoy it, if you can.
referential entries: Paul Thomas Anderson’s INHERENT VICE (2014, 6.3/10); Nicolas Winding Refn’s THE NEON DEMON (2016, 7.5/10).
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