Warner Bros. Pictures
Ryan Gosling has had a charmed career to say the least. Not many people have been able to graduate from TV child star to top tier movie star with millions of adoring fans and a body of work that encompasses everything from commercial films to art house offerings. Gosling’s recent collaborations with Nicolas Winding Refn, Drive and Only God Forgives, seems to have had the biggest influence on his career yet: directing.
So with his successful acting career raking in millions for Hollywood, particularly Warner Bros. which had a major hit with Crazy, Stupid, Love., Gosling was given the chance to direct a movie. And not just any movie, but one that he wrote as well. The result was 2013’s Lost River, which premiered at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival (to both cheers and boos) and also had a screening at the SXSW Festival. The film got a very limited release in the US in April of this year and is now available on home video.
The plot focuses on Bones (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.‘s Ian De Caestecker), his mother Billy (Christina Hendricks) and his younger brother Franky. They live in a dilapidated house in what used to be a thriving town (think Detroit, where the movie was shot), three months behind on the house payment because Billy was tricked into refinancing her mortgage, something she should never have been eligible to do because of her lack of employment. Now the bank is about to foreclose and all of the abandoned houses around them are being torn down. Billy tries to make money by stripping the empty factories of their copper, but has to avoid Bully (an almost unrecognizable Matt Smith) who has laid claim to everything in the town that he can make money from. Bones’ remaining neighbor Rat (Saoirse Ronan), so named because of her pet rat, tells Bones about another town submerged when a reservoir was built and a curse that can only be lifted if something is brought back from Lost River.
The film is billed as a dark fairy tale, and it borrows heavily from David Lynch and the early films of Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet (City of Lost Children, Delicatessen). The look of the film, with its overly saturated color palette will remind hardcore movie fans of the work of Mario Bava. While the film is visually splendid, the story is just a bit too much of WTF, especially when Billy takes a job at a nighclub of sorts where the performers enact various violent and bloody acts such as being bludgeoned to death (while the crowd enthusiastically reacts to being splattered with the fake blood and gore) and slicing off one’s own face. Gosling’s girlfriend Eva Mendes plays Cat, the show’s star performer who meets a bloody “end” night after night.
There are also some truly violent and unsettling moments perpetrated by Bully and his henchmen (one of whom has no lips because Bully cut them off) mostly directed toward Rat and her grandmother (the great Barbara Steele pretty much wasted in a wordless performance that consists mainly of her sitting in front of a TV watching old family home movies).
But the question is, what is Gosling trying to say? Is this an attack on the banking industry for what it did leading up to the recession a few years back where people were losing their homes left and right? That seems to be the main point of the film, but he could also be pointing a finger at corporations outsourcing jobs and shutting down entire cities that relied on their factories as a source of employment and community. Whatever the message, it just gets all jumbled up in Gosling’s slick visuals. The cast all do a fine job with what they’re given to work with, and you do have an affinity for Bones and Rat, but by the time the end credits role you’re going to still be wondering what you just witnessed … and what exactly is going on in Ryan Gosling’s head.
The Blu-ray out now from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment looks stunning, to say the least. Colors are vibrant, blacks are deep, and there is no artifacting. It’s hard to think the film could look any better than it does here. The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track may seem like a mess not up to Warner’s high audio standards, but whatever limitations experienced by the viewer are purely intentional. Johnny Jewel’s excellent soundtrack pulses through the surrounds when necessary, sometimes over-powering the dialog (again, intentionally). There are also times when characters are speaking from behind glass and the voices are appropriately muffled. It’s a bit annoying when you have to keep your finger on the volume button to adjust for the wildly disparate soundtrack, but it is presented as Gosling and Jewel intended so you can’t fault Warners for that.
The film could not look any better than it does here. tweet
If you’re looking for a bountiful collection of bonus material to help make sense of the movie or see Gosling’s filmmaking process … well, you’re out of luck. I’ve never seen a brand new Blu-ray of recent vintage come out with nary a special feature included, but this one is as bare bones as you can get. Not even a trailer. On the plus side, the extra space does give the image the room it needed to look as spectacular as it does. Cinephiles may want to consider adding the film to their collections as a sort of oddity, perhaps devoting several viewing to trying to figure out what Gosling is trying to say, but the casual viewer may feel a bit alienated by the whole thing. It’s a fine line for a film to tread and for viewers to navigate.
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