By James Bowman on 6.5.07 @ 12:01AM
A thirty-something adolescent loser wallowing in self-pity thinking he's soulful.
Boy! I thought movies like Dylan McCormick's Four Lane
Highway went out with the 1960s. And a good thing too. A
sensitive young man named Sean (Fred Weller) who aspires to a
literary career denies his vocation because his now-deceased daddy,
a famous author, was mean to him years before and told him he had
no talent -- even though he had published a story in the New
Yorker! Daddy said they only accepted it because of who his
father was. Sean's long-suffering girlfriend, Molly (Greer
Goodman), must soothe his tortured soul and once again persuade him
of his self-worth. Sean, by the way, is 34 years old. When he asks
his best friend, Lyle (Reg Rogers), why they're still living the
irresponsible and promiscuous lives of college kids, the latter
replies: "Because we can."
It's the one true thing said in the movie. Even if there's
anybody -- apart from the self-pitying auteur -- that
wants to bring this adolescent tosh back before the public, it
can't really be done today. We lack the innocence that was once
willing to look on people like Sean as semi-tragic figures rather
than narcissistic twerps. Go back now and watch even so fine a film
as Five Easy Pieces (1970) and you're likely to be struck
by the falsity and staginess of Jack Nicholson's romantic neuroses.
And he didn't get loved out of them, not even by the
pulchritudinous tag-team of Karen Black and Susan Anspach. Besides,
the bad-dad movie has moved on since those days. There is a sort of
recognition of this in Mr. McCormick's making the old man a drunk
as well as a meanie and an authoritarian.
The specter of "dysfunction" thus hangs over the proceedings, as
well as wounded self-esteem, when Sean himself starts to abuse
alcohol. "The apple doesn't rot far from the tree," as he puts it.
It may or may not be a relevant detail that Lyle is much worse than
Sean: a serious alcoholic who has to come to terms with the fact.
He also, not coincidentally, has his own bad-dad problem, being
estranged from his father, a big shot business executive, because
of his radical left-wing political views. Or are his radical
left-wing political views a product of being estranged from his
father? Either way there is an embryonic subplot in Lyle's story
which strikes me as potentially a lot more interesting than the
main one and which at least might have thrown some light on Sean's
predicament. But it dies a-borning.
In spite of these fatal flaws, Four Lane Highway might
have been easy enough to take if it had been cut by half an hour
and the elaborate narrative framework scrapped. For the story is
told in a confusing series of flashbacks. In the present, Sean and
Molly have been apart for two years. An artist, she has moved back
to New York from the small college town in Maine where she was
teaching when they were together and where Sean now works as a
bartender and a construction worker, having lived there most of his
life. When a show of her paintings is announced by a New York
gallery, Sean and Lyle go to see it, and her. Their road trip in
Sean's old Ford pickup with the camper top provides the first
occasion for flashbacks during which the story of his romantic
involvement with Molly is told.
But once he has got into the habit, Mr. McCormick can't stop
himself from indulging in it again and again. In fact, his
addiction appears to the outsider to be almost as bad as Lyle's.
He's a flashback-oholic off the wagon, constantly and irritatingly
interrupting his own story of Sean and Molly's re-encounter in the
present with far more detail about their past as co-habitees than
we can possibly care to have or, having, make any use of. Of course
the reason is not far to seek. For it's the past that contains all
the juicy tortured-soul stuff and thus all Mr. Weller's best
opportunities to put on the Jack Nicholson shtick -- except that
he's far too innocuous a character to bring it off.
In the present we're meant to see Sean as getting his act
together, and everybody knows that suffering and dysfunction are
more cinematically compelling than recovery. Thus, in organizing
his film the way he does, Mr. McCormick unwittingly points up the
phoniness of its premise. Like one of those old timey melodramas
that smuggled prurience in under the cloak of moral didacticism,
Four Lane Highway uses its inspirational and therapeutic
carapace as a pretext for pain-porn. And even if you're into
pain-porn, the sufferings of so pathetic a wimp as Sean are
unlikely to impress you -- unless you are about 16 or are suffering
from a case of arrested development as serious as his own.
topics:
Business, Movies, Law
