“This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a whimper, but a bang.” 

Sarah Michelle Gellar and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson discover how the world ends in Samuel Goldwyn Films' Southland Tales

If these words sound familiar then you’re associated (if ever so slightly) with T.S. Elliot and his 1925 poem “The Hollow Man.” Of course, in his world things go out with the whimper, not with the bang, but a little thing like that doesn’t stop Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly from paraphrasing him all the same.

The result of that word swapping is the director’ Orwellian by way of Kubrick satire Southland Tales, a gigantic epic of doomsday and pornography that had its disastrous first presentation all the way back at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. Since its much talked about booing Kelly has spent the last year and a half re-editing (excising 19 minutes) and adding over a million dollars in visual effects, all in hopes of finally tweaking things enough audiences respond favorably while still holding true to his unique vision.

Having not seen the original cut I can’t begin to tell you where this one differs other than it is now absent Janeane Garofalo (someday I’ll convince someone to send me to France for the festival, unfortunately just not today). What I can tell you is that this version of Southland Tales is a spectacularly marvelous eye-popping infuriating exasperating sometimes pompous mess with so many ideas and concerns keeping track of them all is a virtual impossibility. The film is as preposterous as it is remarkable, and even if I can’t exactly recommend the thing I certainly can’t dissuade anyone from taking a risk to take it in, either.

Even the basic premise is hard to put into just a couple of words. There is a the right wing Republican Hollywood action star Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson) engaged to a Presidential candidate’s insufferably selfish daughter (Mandy Moore); the porn star Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar) hiding and co-writing a screenplay with him while also being featured in her own reality talk show where she discusses current events with a cadre of her scantily clad and lip-gloss heavy peers; the Hermosa Beach police officer Roland Taverner (Seann William Scott) who goes on a ride-along with the actor and whose connection with twin brother Ronald might go beyond the familial and be the key to unlocking a vast political conspiracy which might just destroy the world.

Oh, and just in case you didn’t already know Abilene, TX has been destroyed by a terrorist nuclear attack, the Patriot Act has suspended just about every single one of our civil liberties and America is currently at war with Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and even Syria. Topping it all off, there’s an election going on and the Clinton/Lieberman ticket isn’t expected to even make a minute dent in the electoral tide.

And there is more, much more, this 2008 California world Kelly envisions teaming with characters and plot strands tripping every bit of the live fantastic. Some of it is eerily prescient and disturbing, other bits turgid and vapidly underdeveloped. But all of it is sprung from the mind of an enthralling visionary wunderkind who doesn’t know when to quit or say enough is enough. From start to finish this film is like nothing else out there right now (and considering the dearth of creative and inspired filmmaking right now that’s truly saying something), and as sprawling and as ill-defined as much of it is when the young writer/director connects he hits his moralistically pointed fable straight out of the ballpark.

The whole thing is a bit like A Clockwork Orange meets Dr. Strangelove crossed with 1984 and greased with a bit of “SNL” infused Monty Python sketch comedy. It’s all over the map and then some, the story’s apocalyptic view of a modern world gone mad so extreme and helter-skelter it nearly drove me insane. At one moment a strikingly scarred Justin Timberlake is lip-synching his way through a song by the Killers amidst a sea of rubber-clad blonde nurses, in another two William Scott’s ascend into the stratosphere aboard a floating ice cream truck filled with weapons of violent destruction.

Suddenly, the more I think and ponder on all of this the more I find myself wanting to go back and experience Kelly monstrous opus for a second time. I want to let it wash over me, watch the flaws explode into vexing disappointment and the successes assault my senses like rampaging elephants of cinematic perfection. I want to hear Moby’s deliriously dexterous score flood my eardrums like a melodious cacophony of sound and fury; I want to lose myself in Alexander Hammond’s eccentrically quixotic production design and Steven Poster’s intoxicatingly dreamlike cinematography. 

Most of all I want to experience this wacko vision of a world gone mad one more time so I can attempt to decipher patterns, rhythms and ideas I’m pretty sure the filmmaker himself doesn’t even know the answers to. Kelly might be biting of more than he can chew, and he certainly doesn’t know how to conceptualize the full smorgasbord of imaginings floating deep inside his brain, but he does make a gorgeously invigorating mess that is for sure. Southland Tales may not be perfect and it certainly isn’t complete but it is unique and it is never boring, and for all its many faults I can’t wait to slip inside its covers many times over.

Film Rating: êê1/2  (out of 4)

Additional Links:

-  Southland Tales Theatrical Trailer