MOVIE REVIEW: 'Down in the Valley'


Here's today's Oregonian movie review.

(Oh, and before we get started: Yes, "The Da Vinci Code" is every bit as lame as they're saying it is.)



The gorgeous, deeply weird "Down in the Valley" is tricky.

It ends violently -- but it starts out as a certain (tired) brand of indie-film romance. A cowboy drifter named Harlan (Edward Norton) woos a headstrong teen named Tobe (Evan Rachel Wood), raising the ire of her corrections-officer father (David Morse).

The pace is lopey. The music's by Mazzy Star. Harlan and Tobe romp in the ocean, dance, do drugs and talk about their dreams in a Beat-poet haze. The cowboy-hatted, lasso-toting Harlan has a simple way of talking, and a knack for finding traces of the Old West in the modern San Fernando Valley -- even if it means stealing a horse for a joyride.

"I'm not crazy, I'm insanely honest," Harlan tells Tobe. "You can do anything you want to do, be anyone you want to be…. I want to speak with my true voice."

But just as Harlan's particular brand of hick poetry gets tiresome -- and just as you're wondering what a lightning talent like Norton saw in the role -- writer-director David Jacobson shows his hand. He's not just playing with the clichés of the indie romance. He's also playing with the clichés of the Western.

Harlan's Roy Rogers courtliness masks serious rescue-fantasy delusions. That "true voice" speech was a sinister foreboding. And "Down in the Valley" slowly turns into a bright, surreal noir Western -- about a fantasist who wants to be a Wild West outlaw, even if the "ghost towns" are half-built housing developments.

What's great (and probably audience-dividing) about "Down in the Valley" is that Jacobson mixes genres without bothering to dilute them. It's a horse-and-smog movie. He takes his modern-Western conceit to its theoretical limits, and you'll either buy into it or you really, really won't. The film opens quietly, with bleak images of industrial sprawl enjoying an uneasy truce with the California scrub. But as Norton's character is driven to extremes, so's the film's look: By the end, we've seen a horseback ride among microwave towers; that same horse parked in a garage; Tobe's foster brother (Rory Culkin) shooting a Colt Peacemaker along a concrete river; and shootouts on movie sets and in tract homes. As a posse led by Morse chases Norton, we chase the movie into a world that feels half out-of-time.

None of this is particularly subtle -- but it's a totally unique meditation on the power of romantic delusion. "The only thing good about the meek is that they make it easier on the ones with gumption," Morse tells Culkin. But does a liar with a credo have more "gumption" than a neglectful but honest man?

Norton (who also produced) reportedly had trouble finding theatrical distribution for "Down in the Valley," despite its quality. I'd argue that speaks more to the mainstreaming of "indie"-film marketing than it does to any problems with Jacobson's odd, beautiful and ambitious film.

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Ride on, surreal cowboy (The Oregonian, May 19, 2006)


Posted: Fri - May 19, 2006 at 05:21 PM        

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