There are no shortage of movies about living in Los Angeles. With most of the celebrities on the planet living there, and millions more aspiring to be them, you create a world that is entirely unlike any other. That strange, dreamlike world is the source of David Robert Mitchell’s newest cinematic creation, Under the Silver Lake. Mitchell, in attempting to lampoon the crazy Lebowski like LA lifestyles, has himself crafted a dense, impressive Edgar Wright like love letter to the City of Angels that will eventually go down as one of the better films to understand the innerworkings of Los Angeles and the Los Angelinos.
Sam (Andrew Garfield) is one of those people that could exist in LA. He’s unemployed and ambitionless, resorting to spying on naked or hot female neighbors and deciphering messages inside music and other pop culture. His life’s “ambition” turns bountiful after a late night escapade with Sarah (Riley Keough), a girl he becomes enamored with. She promises to hang out with him the next day, but Sam finds her apartment empty, apart from a box of possessions. After a mysterious cabal of people take those possessions, Sam follows them around, and descends into a plot only the great Jeffrey Lebowski could have meandered into himself.
I truly wonder how long it took Mitchell to write this story. He’s doing an Edgar Wright impression here, lampooning all those early Hollywood Noir films and mysteries while simultaneously telling a pretty fun neo noir as well. Mitchell clearly knows the beats of this story and merges into the modern LA lifestyle to create these scenarios that could potentially be plausible in Los Angeles…and nowhere else. When Sam meets a balloon woman doing an interpretive dance….and then runs into her again at a crypt club in a cemetery, where the HELL else could something like that happen?! On top of that, Balloon woman feeds Sam information that leads him to…a cereal box map? And a literal Homeless King (David Yow), who helps interpret a pamphlet he got at a chess match to wander through the Hollywood hills? The levels of madness get deeper, and deeper, until you, like Sam, have no idea what is real and what is not. Mitchell’s story is too long to be satisfying all the way through (2h 19 min), and not all of the crazy threads get resolved, but damn if you’re not melting your brain along the way, simultaneously amused, bewildered, tripped out like our protagonist on his journey.
I did mention lampooning, of which there is a lot of it in Under the Silver Lake. It’s too unfocused to be collectively effective, but there are individual scenes that really contain a ton of bite. Take for example, making love to your girlfriend and climaxing while you’re watching a celebrity news story about a family grieving over a murdered loved on while looking at Kurt Cobain’s poster. Or using an uneaten cookie as an entry to a one person show…if you eat a part of it, you won’t be let in! Mitchell generally wants to point out how stupid it can be to take shallow artistic endeavors so seriously, and openly undercuts any serious scene with something hilariously stupid. There’s also jabs toward celebrity obsession, Hollywood phoniness, religious sects, and the ease of serial killing in LA (no one takes it seriously!). Mitchell’s job is done so well I spent most of the movie wondering if I should even be rooting for Andrew Garfield’s character, as he comes off as a real creep a bunch of times (I decided no, for the record).
One way I know a movie is good, is when I start taking its storytelling and immediately using it around my commute home. After Under the Silver Lake, I started noticing every billboard, every neon sign, their proximity to one another, and started trying to piece together how all of them were connected. Such is the joy David Robert Mitchell achieves in his condescension and satire toward living life completely in a dream and disassociating from reality. Or what Los Angeles calls…Tuesday.