Road to Nowhere
Remember when Jean-Luc Godard made a movie called Nouvelle Vague? That’s Monte Hellman making a movie called Road to
Nowhere — a title that could represent most everything the director has ever made, from the enigmatic 1967 Jack Nicholson Western, The Shooting, to his great self-destroying 1971 racing movie, Two-Lane Blacktop.
In Hellman’s unfathomably vast America, the bedrock of identity is knowing where you are and where you’re going. Lose those bearings and you’re lost, in more than a geographical sense. His first new feature since 1989 extends that theme along artistic lines: It’s a mystifying neo-noir puzzle about a tyro director named Mitchell Haven (Tygh Runyan), who comes to suspect that the lead actress (Shannyn Sossamon) in his new true-crime drama has more than a passing resemblance to the real-life femme fatale. The more
besotted he becomes with her — Hellman tellingly dedicates the movie to Laurie Bird, the late female lead of Two-Lane Blacktop — the less he’s able to separate his fictional narrative from the miasma before him.
Lovingly scripted by Hellman’s longtime collaborator Steven Gaydos, the movie is hampered by a cast that sometimes resembles stand-ins, and by camerawork that’s impressive mostly for its low-budget resourcefulness. (It was shot using the digital video function of what is essentially a Canon still camera — a next-step threshold in micro-budget moviemaking but a mixed bag aesthetically.) Still, from the tantalizing first shot on, Road to Nowhere buzzes with allusions and meta-movie gamesmanship, giving the 78-year-old director, at long last, a project that fuses his art-house sensibility and his Roger Corman-honed run-and-gun smarts.
After two decades of thwarted efforts on Hollywood’s road to nowhere, it’s heartening to watch this undaunted maverick plow his own off-ramp.
