At the Village East, Second Avenue at 12th Street, East Village. Civit edited by Celine Ameslon music by Tom Russell production design by Laurie Post produced by Melissa Hellman released by Monterey Media. It has sexual situations, violence and strong language.ĭirected by Monte Hellman written by Steven Gaydos director of photography, Josep M. “Road to Nowhere” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian).
#Road to nowhere movie movie
They don’t seem to notice that what he is clutching is not a firearm but a digital movie camera. Spying Mitch in the window, they order him to surrender his weapon. Late in the film the police arrive in force at a motel after a violent episode in which lives are lost. As exciting as it may be to become swept up in your own brainstorm, “Road to Nowhere” suggests you would be a fool not to resist. What’s being explored isn’t the crime itself but the relationship of a filmmaker to a project in which he gets lost. The fraud being examined is actually pretty banal.
Russell’s songs (another lyric alludes to “the movies in our hearts”) build a mood of brooding intensity. The long static shots of the characters barely moving, the expressive use of color (especially dark blue) and Mr. Hellman’s movie only partly fulfills its promise as a gripping neo-noir mystery, his stylistic hallmarks lend it a singularly haunting atmosphere. This aspect of the story is a blatant rehash of “Vertigo.”īut if Mr. The drama’s other major player, Rafe (Cliff De Young), is Velma’s co-conspirator who may have planned their possibly faked suicides in a plane crash. The hotheaded Bruno increasingly questions Mitch’s commitment to uncover the truth. The tangled plot involves a surly, tattooed undercover insurance investigator named Bruno Brotherton (Waylon Payne), who is hired by Mitch as a consultant because he knows the region. It is suggested that Laurel, who visits Velma’s grave, may actually be Velma. Hellman’s longtime collaborator Steven Gaydos.Īdding to the truth-or-fiction tease is that Laurel is said to be a dead ringer for Velma Duran, one of the perpetrators who supposedly died in a double suicide. The screenplay, in which fiction and reality eventually merge, is by Mr. Mitch’s movie, also titled “Road to Nowhere,” is shown on a DVD played on a computer by Nathalie (Dominique Swain), a crime blogger whose account of a $100 million insurance fraud in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina inspired the story. Sossamon, fetching as she is, is no femme fatale in the classic mode. He declares at one point that a director’s three most important jobs are “casting, casting and casting.” But the acting in “Road to Nowhere” is uneven.
Hellman’s first feature film in 21 years, a late-life cri de coeur by this fervently admired Hollywood cult director, now 78? Or is it a deadpan satire of his own vainglorious ambitions and that of filmmakers in general? What is the significance of all these high-minded allusions? Is “Road to Nowhere,” Mr. The portentous attitude of “Road to Nowhere” is amplified by its incorporation of excerpts from three classic films: “The Lady Eve” from Preston Sturges, “The Seventh Seal” by Ingmar Bergman and Víctor Erice’s “Spirit of the Beehive.” At one point the new film’s protagonist, Mitch Haven (Tygh Runyan), a fictional movie director besotted with his unknown hand-picked star, Laurel Graham (Shannyn Sossamon), recites George Santayana’s poem “As in the Midst of Battle There Is Room.” The last verse describes life’s bitter awakening from the fantasies of youth to find “despair before us, vanity behind.”
Russell sings in the sepulchral tone of a dour country prophet warning of inevitable doom. “Row, row, row your little dreamboat violently back upstream,” Mr. Voltaire’s observation “Illusion is the first of all pleasures” is the tag line of Monte Hellman’s grandiloquent neo-noir, “Road to Nowhere.” The dangerous temptation to embrace impossible dreams is also addressed in Tom Russell’s title song, a gloomy stylistic mash-up of Dylan, Springsteen and Cash.
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