With this, Hellman adds to one’s sense of the interview as stage-managed fakery. Haven does an interview with Variety‘s Peter Bart, sometimes answering falsely in ways that mirror real Hollywood BS (he claims he tries to avoid getting “involved” with his actresses, but will soon be sleeping with his lead.) At the end of the interview, the camera reveals a good deal more filmmaking equipment than one would imagine necessary. This is true even of the lighter-hearted side of filmmaking that Hellman portrays. There is also a devastating absurdity to his film and, by extension, the statement he’s making. “For me Road to Nowhere is a love poem to the movies,” Hellman told the Los Angeles Times.
#Road to nowhere movie tv
The classic movies Mitchell watches admiringly on TV with Laurel intersect with Hellman’s plot, for example.
Here the point seems to be the construction of a world of illusions from which one cannot be extricated. This is of course not a new idea, but in many other movies about moviemaking the illusion-reality theme is treated as liberatingly imaginative, or with a certain decipherable clarity (as in Hitchcock’s references to cinema in Rear Window and Vertigo). The actual truth is less important than Hellman’s intermingling of illusion and reality. Laurel has a shadowy connection to the real-life couple, and some suspect she either is Velma or is impersonating her.
#Road to nowhere movie movie
Mitchell Haven’s (Tygh Runyan) movie is based on a real event: the disappearance of a North Carolina couple, Velma Duran and Rafe Taschen, who vanished (a possible double suicide) along with $100 million. The director of that movie is Mitchell Haven (those shared initials are no coincidence) and its producer is Marissa Haven (Hellman’s daughter, Melissa Hellman, produced Road to Nowhere), and it is sometimes unclear whether we’re watching the movie within the movie or Hellman’s actual story. Laurel emerges, the credits roll, and we are in the labyrinth: the credits are not for Hellman’s movie, but for the movie that Hellman’s movie is about. A man emerges and, after a pause, there’s a gunshot. Outside her window, the night is punctured by the headlights of an arriving car.
#Road to nowhere movie full
In Road to Nowhere, however, the scenes are full of inner life.įrom there, Hellman cuts to Laurel’s hair waving in the blast of the dryer. The road in Two-Lane Blacktop is treated as an irreducible given, for the characters and for the viewer. Hellman’s rejection of any explanation for the state of things is part of what makes his work so strong. One is stuck in a present in which nothing has any visible causes. The imagery of Hellman’s earlier films has a hard-edged, almost flat toughness. As Hellman himself, now 79, told an interviewer, “In a lot of ways I feel like Road to Nowhere is my first movie-everything else before it was a rehearsal.” Now, in his first feature in 21 years (lack of financing for past projects is reportedly to blame), Hellman has made his finest work, a hall-of-mirrors masterpiece about moviemaking in which the diversions are more complex, and therefore more enticing.
The nihilism of American car culture has never been more deeply explored nothing seems to matter much to anyone, and there is neither tension nor joy in the races-the last of which famously ends with the movie projector seemingly breaking down and burning the film. The trip, interrupted by occasional car-races-for-money, eventually becomes a long-haul race to D.C. The blacktop in question is truly a “road to nowhere,” traveled by two young men (played by singer James Taylor and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson) in an old souped-up Chevy. Hellman, a low-budget director who never had a big box-office hit, first came to critical attention with his two mid-1960s “existential westerns,” Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting (both starring Jack Nicholson), as well as with his best-known film, the road movie and cult classic Two-Lane Blacktop (1971). Road to Nowhere isn’t just the title of Monte Hellman’s latest film it’s also the plot synopsis for all his best work.
0 kommentar(er)
