Review
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Not At Any Price: “Art” More Than Art

Since the failure of Two-Lane Blacktop, Hellman hasn’t directed much (movies with titles like Cockfighter, Iguana and China 9, Liberty 37), and his first feature in more than 20 years is the new ROAD TO NOWHERE. A slow, shaggy-dog whatsit-noir, Nowhere harkens back in many ways to an older day of art films. It exists among several parallel timelines and levels of “reality,” like Resnais’ Last Year At Marienbad or Muriel; concerns itself with the mechanics of filmmaking as a metaphor for personal disconnection, like Godard’s Contempt; and its portrayal of a film set recalls Fassbinder’s Beware A Holy Whore. Unlike those pictures, in the end Nowhere doesn’t have all that much to say.

Noirs at least can be fun. Hellman and Road to Nowhere take themselves excruciatingly seriously, with agonizing pacing, lengthy poetry readings, portentous a capella songs, and extended clips from better movies. It’s hard to judge the acting, in the sense that the performers are almost all playing versions of versions of versions, but it’s pretty clear that while Sossamon has a magnetic presence (she’s one of those actresses who’s always seemed one good role away from stardom), many of the other actors are either trying too hard to give stylized performances or just not faring very well. Even though the movie is in English, it has the slightly disembodied feel of a foreign film that had to be postsynched.
Road to Nowhere is the kind of picture where cops yell at someone to “Drop the weapon!” when the person in question is just holding a camera–and they say it 3 times, so we’ll all get the parallel being offered between a movie camera and a gun. Doubtless all the dissertations being written about The Cinema of Monte Hellman will require new chapters to assess the film’s thematic and metaphorical additions to the Hellman canon. But not every cult filmmaker is a Terence Malick.
(ROAD TO NOWHERE – Monterey Media – 122 minutes- R – Director: Monte Hellman – Script: Steven Gaydos – Cast: Tygh Runyon, Shannyn Sossomon, Cliff DeYoung, Waylon Payne – Limited Release)