Release Year: 2014
Director: Ryan Gosling
Runtime: 95 minutes
Someone with a day job as mastered as Ryan Gosling’s ought not to quit it, but cannot be blamed for at least trying something new, right? Most actors who take to the director’s chair do so without much ambition, usually taking minimal risks and having one of the wealthiest fallbacks should those risks even fail, but what shocks me about Lost River (besides, you know, everything else about it) is that Gosling takes anything but the safe route with his directorial debut. Where he would be expected and almost forgiven to direct a straightforward, cookie-cut statement, Gosling presents viewers with a fantastical enigma, a film that is truly a metaphor and idiom itself.
The imagery of Lost River is by far its most masterful quality. The detail and intricacy and tasteful color palette that goes into each shot makes the film breathtaking on this basis alone. Cinephiles (or even people who have just seen Drive) will note the similarities to the work of Nicolas Winding Refn, and while it is almost impossible not to draw this comparison, it is downright disrespectful to leave it at that. This film still develops a distinct style, more like the spiritual relative of Refn’s work rather than the blatant offspring. I always felt like I was in fact watching Lost River and I never got its style derivatively confused with any other. If the film had no other good qualities I would still have been blown away.
But lack other virtues it does not: the film is wonderfully acted from start to finish, with wistful and almost dreamlike (but still somewhat emotionally grounded) performances fleshing out every gorgeous shot. Iain De Caestecker stood out to me as having a really impressive character interpretation, and Matt Smith came to play as well. The tension between these characters felt very real and eventually three-dimensional (after several characterizing interactions). Eva Mendes is shown as a terrifying agent of the entertainment underworld depicted in this film, with a very convincing personality. Christina Hendricks’ portrayal of a desperate single mother was also believable, and I felt like I’d practically met Saoirse Ronan’s character Rat.
What these characters say through these performances is where the film gets admittedly spotty. The dialogue is not always Gosling’s main mode of communicating feelings and moods (and I duly respect the long stares in their place) but when it is present it does not always keep the film running in the most attention-worthy direction. Dialogue feels like a checked-off list item rather than a necessary component of a scene, and while this does eliminate potential suspicion of a perfect debut, it still makes some scenes unintentionally uncomfortable. An exchange of dialogue I liked, however, was between Rat and Bones. Rat asks what’s keeping Bones in their lost cause of a town, since he has every reason to leave, and he answers in almost a non-sequitur that his mother and brother live there. He doesn’t explicitly say he doesn’t want to leave them, but the audience and Rat are not dense: it is easily surmised he is staying for them, not himself, and Rat brings this to even more light for him. There was only one way for the is conversation to go and this scene took it there very realistically.
The film is very disturbing when it is not endearing, and the fact these scenes really stick out and contribute to the tone more than traditional narrative is probably most people’s most prominent gripe. Lost River tries to be more evocative than sensical, which at first sounds harsh but makes sense from an atmospheric standpoint. Watching interviews with Gosling revealed that this fairy tale type of narrative was not an excuse for surrealistic events but an actual artistic choice. This becomes more obvious in retrospect, as the head-scratching points in the narrative are not plot contrivances that failingly attempt to have the plot make more sense, but bursts of pathos and imagery that take one out of the traditional storytelling style. Gosling attempts to have realism and surrealism act as a sort of yin and yang to coexist in the film, not to have surrealism as a deus ex machine when the realism becomes too hard for him.
This ambition is thrilling and memorable, and the fact a film is difficult to watch does not necessarily make it bad, especially when the difficulty derives from defiance of preference and convention, not quality or originality. Gosling’s inspiration is on his sleeve throughout the gem that is Lost River, but it is used as a vehicle of artistic osmosis from Refn and Lynch’s work into his, rather than some crutch from which he never strays. I enjoyed this film from its acting to its production design to its prophetic foretaste of what we love about Stranger Things. It’s imperative to take the flawed but wonderful Lost River seriously.
AL Movie Index 