Road to Nowhere (2011)

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

disgusting, overrated, pointless

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

These days, American films which attract 'serious' critical attention tend to appear in a blaze of publicity, and are usually forgotten by the time the next self-declared 'masterpiece' is ready for consumption. Monte Hellman's ROAD TO NOWHERE took a different approach, quietly opening in a handful of US cinemas before being released on DVD. Yet in years to come, this will surely be regarded as the defining film of its era. Indeed, it may well be the LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD of our generation: an endlessly fascinating puzzle which resists easy comprehension, and whose solution, like Gatsby's green light, constantly "recedes before us," leaving us with the hope that "tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning—." For this is a cinematic masterpiece in a peculiarly American tradition: one that refuses to sit down and behave, but instead wanders restlessly in several directions, accruing, like Melville's White Whale, a range of possible meanings without ever definitively committing itself to any of them. This is not a film to be watched once and dismissed, but rather a work of art to live with, one that - like VERTIGO and CITIZEN KANE - should be returned to periodically in the hope not of finding the key to the Borgesian labyrinth, but rather of better comprehending the labyrinth's nature.

Road to Nowhere is auteur director Monte Hellman's first film in 21 years and is a breathtaking return to cinema. The film premiered in competition at the 67th Venice Int' Film Festival and won the Jury Award Special Lion for Career Achievement. This recognition is a testament to the quality of the film as well as the genius of the filmmaker behind it. The film also features a terrific cameo from legendary film actor Fabio Testi. I look forward to many more films from Hellman in the future. His latest project is 'Love or Die', which is scheduled to commence shooting in Lisbon in March 2014. He is truly one of the greatest film directors in the history of American film.William Anderson

The director's first effort in 21 years shows he has lost none of his craftsmanship: the film is closest in tone to TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (1971) from his earlier work, in that it starts to tell a particular tale but, whilst losing sight of its objective along the way, ends up revealing the real truth underneath, as it were. Given its device of having the movie-making business serve as backdrop to a puzzle, I somehow expected this to be akin to MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001) – but I am glad to report that the film very much adheres to the themes Hellman liked to explore well before David Lynch became a household word! This usually involves an odyssey where the protagonist obsesses over something or other, but the answers that he comes up with ultimately say more about himself than anything else! In addition, we have several layers of perception going on at once here: the noir-ish story itself, a film being shot based on this, the insurance investigation that might have detected links between the two, and a parallel probe by a female blogger that tries to make sense of the whole! Though the central intrigue (incorporating pretty standard elements i.e. an embezzler, a femme fatale and the cop on their trail eventually opting for a cut of the proceeds) is rather sketchily presented, one is still engrossed enough to wish that a solution to the mystery had been provided. Indeed, the waters are further muddled towards the end by not only suggesting that it is still an ongoing plot strand but by having these characters and their movie incarnations played by the self-same actors (the scene in question, in fact, seems to have elicited sheer befuddlement from eminent movie critic Roger Ebert)! Incidentally, casting is effective all around – and especially Shannyn Sossamon's heroine – though I was only familiar with two of its members, namely Dominique Swain (as the blogger-turned-amateur-reporter, who becomes attached beyond the 'call of duty' to the insurance man) and Fabio Testi (a Hellman regular, appearing briefly in the part of the leading lady's father). The male protagonist, then, is the movie's young director – named Mitchell Haven, it is no coincidence that he shares Monte Hellman's own initials: he too begins a romance (with Sossamon), gets in too deep (so that he allows his personal life to cloud his judgment on set) and, finally, becomes the 'star' in his own crime drama! The device of showing the protagonists watching such established classics as THE LADY EVE (1941), THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (1973) and THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957) on TV comes off as rather heavy-handed – though, by a stretch, one could assume that the idea was to subtly mirror the film's own themes of role-playing, disenchantment and mortality respectively! Also, while it maintains an unhurried pace, ROAD TO NOWHERE is marked by sudden moments of violence – apart from the climactic confrontation that escalates into a shoot-out, the image early on of a plane coming into frame to crash at sea is most memorable. Interestingly, we get two set of credits here – one for the film itself (at the very end) and the other (actually the opening credits) for the one it is about, with which it just happens to share the title! In fact, the very first shot has a DVD-R of the film-within-the-film being loaded in a lap-top: given that it is recorded on the notoriously unreliable Memorex brand, I wonder whether this was an in-joke by which Hellman is telling us not to trust what comes afterwards...

While it would be nice to report that after a 20 year absence cult director Monte Hellman has returned with some sort of existential masterpiece on the nature of movie-making, complete with tragic death and lost innocence as some of its themes, this torpid, nearly incomprehensible muddle of a story about a young director making a low-budget film merely leaves one confused and numb. What might have been a worthy companion piece to Lynch's "Mulholland Drive," Dennis Hopper's "The Last Movie" or even the great Billy Wilder's "Sunset Blvd." crawls so far up its own convoluted pseudo-intellectual ass that making it through to the final credits becomes an endurance test. Hellman commented recently that directing is 90 or 95% casting. He might want to focus a little more on the directing next time, and find a script that has a compelling story and characters one can actually care about. But this has never been his forte, of course. A good deal of the blame goes to the editor, who allows scenes to meander a half a minute or more after they've effectively ended. The version I saw resembled a rough cut, not a finished film, complete with such snore-inducing moments as the main actress staring at a blow dryer for what seemed an eternity.If Hellman's goal was to make a "personal" film that he alone can connect to and appreciate, then perhaps he has succeeded. But wouldn't it have been wonderful if this revered auteur could have -- for once -- created something that others could appreciate, too, perhaps even understand and enjoy... a picture with interesting characters and a story worth telling... something that might have been considered releasable by a small but respected distributor.... possibly returning Hellman to the filmmaking world of the 21st century as a viable director.Alas, this mood experiment with digital photography, bland 1-dimensional characters, a 1970s Leonard Cohen inspired soundtrack and a cryptic, fragmented storyline may appeal to his very close inner circle of fans, but will likely leave the rest of us out in the cold, bewildered, confused, and wondering what all the accolades could have been about back in the 60s and 70s.