‘Look at my muscles, look at my muscles’, the solitary snippet of dialogue, incessantly chanted from atop a pickup truck by our very own Matt Smith, that the vast majority will have heard from Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut, Lost River. However, after enduring what can only be described as a phantasmagorical neo-noir love letter to the likes of Nicolas Winding Refn and David Lynch, perhaps those four words are a suitable embodiment of this film’s inflated opinion of itself.
Now that may seem like a rather fleeting statement after only a single viewing, and you may well be right in thinking that as it did strike me as a film comparable with how a whiskey connoisseur would describe a bottle of scotch: its gets better with age, or in this case, the more times you see it. Many films have built up a cult following after a bad reception at Cannes or a poor showing at the box office, but with Lost River there is a strong element of doubt as to whether we’ll be seeing it at our local cinemas anytime soon, which frankly may be a good thing.
The film’s setting itself, a penniless wasteland area of Detroit, reeks of David Fincher with his penchant for dystopian locales (e.g. Fight Club, The Game), however it is difficult to avoid when coupled with a narrative that is so desperate to tackle real life issues, yet lands us in a world that even Tim Burton would likely steer clear of, that its not so much rejecting any slight elements of positivity but rather, running away from them.
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Moreover, for a filmmaker who has himself cited Nicolas Winding Refn as a major influence on his approach, Gosling’s plot does not deviate massively in terms of relative content from both Drive and Only God Forgives, but has a very dissatisfying transparency and shapelessness. A recipe for disaster having known beforehand that, due to his prominence in the movie business, Lost River would inevitably be compared to the crème de la crème of the neo-noir genre.
Gosling must be applauded however (if a little sarcastically), for his very aptly named characters, first and foremost of which is Billy (Christina Hendricks), a single mother who due to her increasing financial insecurity takes a job at mind-bogglingly obscure burlesque club which, judging by the acts performed, were it real, a likely tagline would be ‘A slice of oppression to go with your misogynist martini, sir? Or perhaps a piece of pervert pie?’ Bones (Iain De Caestecker), Billy’s son, spends the majority of his time looting abandoned houses to their bare bones, you could say, in search of items of value (scrap metal apparently). His companion on this noble quest is his neighbour and love interest, for lack of a better term, Rat (Saoirse Ronan), apparently named because of her pet rat and not the fact she spends her time roaming the streets of a wasteland. Then we have Bully (Matt Smith), who (that’s right you guessed it) is a fitness-obsessed bully. He deems the wasteland to be his turf and thus antagonizes anyone disturbing it e.g. Bones and Rat. Finally we have Dave, who runs the club that Billy works for as well as being the manager of her bank (so we see how she fell into that trap now, don’t we). A typical sleezeball, as you’d expect, he makes advances on Billy at virtually every opportunity, much to her repulsion.
Now, to adhere to anyone who does not want the entire plot ruined for them I shall end simply with; for the amount of expectation piled upon this production from various different avenues, be it neo-noir buffs excited for a new and possibly unexpected director to try his hand or Doctor Who fans eager to see their hero switch from a madman with a box to a madman with a microphone, Lost River is some way from standing alongside masterpieces such as Drive, Blue Velvet and Fight Club, to name but a few.
Words by Alex G