One of the bigger stories out of last year’s Cannes Film Festival was the less-than-positive response given to Lost River, the directorial debut of Ryan Gosling. I am sure some of that was amped up in the press due to Gosling’s celebrity and, therefore, clickability, but if you were visiting movie websites at the time, it was kind of a difficult story to avoid. I was still curious though. I am not a big fan of Gosling as an actor, but perhaps he would sync up better with me when he is behind the camera. Turns out, not so much. The man has talent, definitely, but I think he needs to learn the difference between being a visual stylist and visual storyteller. He has the stylization in spades, it’s the story that could use some work.
The title Lost River refers to the town where this story takes place, a poverty-ridden dump built on the banks of a reservoir that flooded the adjoining town. All that remains are the tops of street lamps coming out of the water. One of the families in Lost River is single mother Billy (Christina Hendricks) with Bones (Iain De Caestecker), her teenage son, and a little boy named Franky (Landyn Stewart). They are three months behind on paying the bank for the loan on their house, and they are in need of cash quickly. While Bones strips houses for scrap metal to sell, putting him in the unfavorable eye of local crazy pants (Matt Smith), Billy takes up an offer proposed by the lascivious bank manager (Ben Mendelsohn, of course playing a slimy individual) to work at a club whose entertainment is less than family friendly, performing for people who enjoy some blood on stage.
The club provides a great majority of the visual imagery I was referring to. There is Hendricks sitting on stage at a vanity table, pretending to cut the skin off her face, the back hallways painted a harsh shade of light purple — including the ceiling and floor — making a vacuum of suffocating purple. And cinematographer Benoît Debie (Spring Breakers, Enter the Void) captures all the arresting visuals expertly. He has sort of made a career in neon soaked weirdness, and this is no exception.
Gosling and Debie are able to make images and moments that stick with you. I will never forget Mendelsohn strangely dancing in front of Hendricks, as she’s locked in clear container molded to the female form. But what am I supposed to gather from all of this? Yeah, Gosling, you can film some weird stuff, but why is it happening? If you just throw a bunch of weirdness on the screen with no backbone, I’m not going to feel anything and eventually tire of the tedium.
It’s a shame, really, because the actual story has stakes and the potential to be interesting, the first act being the strongest, firmly establishing this impoverished community, the struggles people are going through and their desire to leave. Matt Smith as the psychopathic Bully, making Lost River his territory, is properly scary, and you can feel the threat. There’s also a sweet relationship between Bones and next door neighbor Rat (Saoirse Ronan), named after her pet rat, who is dealing with a grandmother (Barbara Steele) who has not spoken since her husband’s death decades ago. This act has visual flourishes, absolutely, but it’s a relatively believable world and one I was invested in. Then Gosling had to get all fancy.
There’s a fantastical side to the story, introducing a monster that has cursed the area (which explains the film’s original title How to Catch a Monster), but it’s subplot that’s quickly forgotten. There’s an attempt to try and bring it back for the climax of the film, but it feels totally unearned as we have been spending most of our time elsewhere for the majority of the film.
This is not a movie I am mad I saw, and it certainly doesn’t deserves the vitriol it received out of Cannes. It’s just a disappointment. There is enough good stuff here to see a fully realized story could have been told, but ultimately, its style gets too carried away. It feels as if Gosling had scenes he wanted to film and tried to find a story to fit those secene, but with all the visual flair he throws at us, it’s still a simple scene like Bones talking to an older man in the first five minutes that packs the largest punch.
