First off: sorry to disappoint everyone out there, but this is absolutely not the train wreck everyone has already decided it is.
But is it a good movie? Actually, I’m pretty sure that question is irrelevant. Writer Brett Easton Ellis and Director Paul Schrader have done exactly what they set out to do, which was to make an experimental, EXTREMELY low budget film. Despite a terrible-seeming opening scene, it is not badly written or directed. Despite what seem like stilted, stiff performances, it is not necessarily badly acted (but more on that later). All the things that people would use as weapons to bludgeon the movie with, are wholly intentional. And I know we try to make it a binary world, where things are good or bad, but what use are value judgments in the face of a piece of art that has been constructed to the exact specifications of its creators?
If I’m talking about the movie as an object as opposed to a piece of entertainment, that’s kind of the point. This movie is not entertainment. It’s not the campfest it’s initial trailer teased it out to be. It’s cold, cerebral, analytical. It takes a dispassionate look at young Hollywood, and raises the intriguing question: does Hollywood suck out your soul, or do people come to Hollywood because they never had one to begin with? Which is not a surprise if you’re even remotely familiar with the works of Brett Easton Ellis. He specializes in this kind of postmodern, west coast despair. It’s a milieu he seems to know, but it’s also the same stuff we assume about the dark side of Hollywood anyway, thanks in part to his previous works being so influential. So we’ve seen all this before, without question. But originality isn’t the point this time. Reality is.
I’ve only read one of Easton Ellis’ books, but I’ve seen most of the movies based on them, and they all share a similar stylization, trying to find the visual equivalent to Ellis’ literary pyrotechnics. They all share the desire to put you inside the coke and ecstacy addled, sex-crazed brains of their characters. Paul Schrader, being Paul Schrader, goes in the exact opposite direction, keeping everything cold, aloof, and distant. This is not a stylish movie, and intentionally so. He films every beautiful person, beautiful building, and small, lovely pile of cocaine with the same dispassionate gaze. Everything is as empty as everything else. Which is as good a segue as any into talking about the performances, meaning I finally have to address the elephant in the room: Lindsay Lohan.
If I’m being honest, I never really “got” Lindsay Lohan. To me, she was a good actress, never great. The only movie of hers I really even liked was Mean Girls, and I think it’s safe to attribute that to Tina Fey. The point being, her whole deal was lost on me. I always figured it was the uniqueness of having a natural redhead as a star that attributed to her meteoric rise, because it sure as shit wasn’t the movies themselves. And because of my general disinterest in her as an actress, I found myself mostly unmoved by her fall from grace. It was sad in the same way that all sad Hollywood stories are sad, and I can only care so much about people I don’t really know.
Her casting in The Canyons is obvious stunt casting. Come to that, every movie she’ll be cast in from now on will probably be considered ‘stunt casting’, but that’s how fame works these days, I guess. But her casting is thematically appropriate, even as it is morally troubling. She’s not really playing herself, or even necessarily a variation on herself. She’s playing a person who has compromised her sense of being for the illusion of safety. Her character has a very specific kind of pain, but it’s being fueled by Lohan’s real life pain, and it gets uncomfortable to watch. I don’t know if it’s good acting, but it’s definitely mesmerizing.
Alongside her we have James Deen, who I understand is some kind of porn star. He is also the single best thing about this movie. I don’t know much about Deen (though, thanks to this movie, I’m very aware of what his penis looks like), but he embodies the exact sort of sexy sociopath Ellis loves to write about. He’s got this kind of subdued magnetism that feels so real and works exactly perfectly for this type of movie. In fact, I definitely think he has what it takes to go mainstream. I certainly want to see him in something else. Not one of his day job movies, though. I, uh… don’t think that’s for me.
As for the other actors, here’s where it gets a little tricky. They lack the bruised realism of Lindsay or the eerie charisma of Deen, but they’re not bad. Amanda Brooks is fairly winning as the only semi-decent person in the entire film, and Tenille Houston does what’s asked of her. But the delightfully named Nolan Funk… well, that’s where it gets complicated. As the hunky loverboy from Lohan’s past, Funk seems flat and wooden. But, and here’s the rub, I’m pretty sure that’s intentional. He’s supposed to be vapid; a not-great SyFy Channel Original Movie level actor. Not just in his nonexistent career, but in life. This is brought up multiple times in actual dialogue, so it’s not at all unintentional. And, on top of that, his flatness is only flat in the context of movie acting. The truth is, the things he says and the way he says them only sound fake because they’re delivered without technique or artifice. Because the plot is essentially a soap opera, we expect the acting to be in some way bigger, more stylized. There’s nothing stylized about Funk’s performance. It’s affectless in a calculated manner. Artifice posing as reality pretending to be artifice disguised as reality.
This movie is a fucking hall of mirrors.
In the end, I cannot say whether or not I recommend this movie. It’s a cerebral exercise trying none too hard to pass as a thriller, and as such, it’s not made to be enjoyed. But I appreciated and admired what they were trying to do, even as I wondered what the point was. So, to anyone who sees the trailer and dismisses it as bad drama, know this:
It’s not drama, it’s anthropology.
