Ryan Gosling (2014)

The directing bug that actors get seems not only infectious but to be striking people down increasingly early in their careers.  Warren Beatty, Paul Newman and Robert Redford were all past forty when they directed their first feature.  So was George Clooney but his contemporary Sean Penn was only thirty-one when The Indian Runner was released in 1991 and Ben Stiller not quite thirty when Reality Bites appeared in 1994.  In 2006, Jamie Bell was quoted as saying that, once he’d got a couple more years of acting under his belt, he wanted to start directing movies:  he was twenty at the time.  Nine years on, Bell hasn’t yet moved behind the camera but bigger acting stars like Angelina Jolie and Ben Affleck have.  (These two have bucked the trend in different ways.  The yearning to direct seems to be a largely male phenomenon – or perhaps it’s just harder for women to get the money needed to make a film.  Affleck, who’s not a great actor, has so far been a consistently effective director.)  Now Ryan Gosling has written and directed Lost River, which was screened at Cannes in 2014 several months before his thirty-fourth birthday.  Why do these people want to be directors while they’re still in demand, doing interesting work, giving pleasure and earning large amounts of money, as performers?  The motives are probably somewhat different in each case but you can’t help suspecting that movie actors proud of their intelligence feel that, within contemporary celebrity culture, they need to become less visible in order to prove themselves as artists.

On the evidence of Lost River, Ryan Gosling doesn’t want to be merely a movie director: he wants to be an art-film director – an auteur, and from the word go.  It must be a particular disappointment to him that his movie has been mauled, and deservedly so, by most critics.  Gosling scores high on obscurity here.  I supposed the film’s main theme was dispossession – cultural and geographical, of family and memory – but, for much of the time, I had little idea what was going on.  I’m more than usually indebted to the Wikipedia synopsis:

‘A single mother enters a dark lifestyle after facing economic difficulties. Meanwhile her eldest son has to take care of his younger brother because of the absence of their mother and gets into trouble with the town’s feared bully, while trying to help to get some money to help his mother. Afterward, he uncovers a road leading to an underwater utopia.’

Lost River‘s incomprehensibility doesn’t get in the way, though, of understanding that it’s no good – and the determined incoherence of the narrative doesn’t disguise the fact that Lost River is, in every sense, a vanity project.  The film looks to be designed for viewers who can spot references to other films, even other oeuvres.  The most obvious influence – by which I mean the source Ryan Gosling draws from most crudely – is David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.  The title song of Lost River, by Johnny Jewel, is a skilful pastiche of a smoky, mysterious, old-time ballad but whereas the night club in Blue Velvet was a distinct location, the different worlds of Gosling’s film bleed into each other (sometimes literally – there’s a tendency towards extravagant gore).  Everything seems to be taking place either underwater or in what Peter Bradshaw accurately describes as the ‘entirely ridiculous nightclub specialising in horror-porn cabaret’.

It’s a semi-irony that actors-turned-filmmakers often do their best work handling the cast.  (Robert Redford’s Ordinary People is an obvious example and Sean Penn, in The Pledge, achieved something exceptional:  he got from Jack Nicholson a fine and fully felt performance in the role of a man who was essentially and increasingly depressed.)  Ryan Gosling gets convincing characterisations from Saoirse Ronan (luminous as the girl with whom Iain De Caestecker’s elder brother develops a relationship), Ben Mendelsohn (as a bank manager – his best moment comes doing a compellingly awkward solo dance routine) and Landyn Stewart (the younger brother).  Christina Hendricks (as the single mother) conveys a sense that it’s all too much for her:  she would be more persuasive if she hadn’t given a similar impression in other film parts, when she wasn’t meant to be doing so.  Still, Hendricks is a magnetic and touching image and works better here than she did in another recent actor-directed movie, John Slattery’s God’s Pocket.   Matt Smith is ‘the town’s feared bully’ and Eva Mendes the headliner at the nightmarish night club.

12 April 2015