Under the Silver Lake (2019)

Under the Silver Lake feels like a machine that could run beautifully and smoothly if it wasn’t for the fact that so many of its cogs seem to have been smashed into the wrong place. This is a good time to note that I’m going to mention another very polarising film as a point of reference and a good time to point out that this is my opinion and, really, shouldn’t mean anything to you.

First and foremost, everything about this film’s first three acts works so spectacularly well – which makes the underwhelming and, in all honesty, destructively confusing final act all the more frustrating.

Under the Silver Lake feels so similar to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice. However, where Inherent Vice felt incomprehensible, often to the point of being frustrating, it always felt as though Anderson – and, obviously, by extension Pynchon – actually knew how all these bizarre pieces fell into place. And I felt more than happy to re-watch and re-place certain puzzle pieces. That isn’t the case here, because every puzzle piece feels like it came from a different box.

For the most part it has everything you could want from film-noir. Mystery, intrigue, sex and a whole collection of characters who never seem to be sober at any point. But something just gets lost in the mix. There were a number of times that I thought I had a grasp on where the film was going, and at one point I thought “Yes, this is going to be wonderful.” But then it never follows through on what you think Mitchell might have been going for.

Under the Silver Lake feels like it can’t settle on what message it wants to get across and as a result ends up giving off the impression that Mitchell had one story in mind but changed his mind halfway through production, and by that point it was already too late to rewrite the entire script and he just hoped no one would notice.

Something that stands heads-and-tails above anything else is Andrew Garfield. He fully embraces this unnamed, slumped over, semi-Lebowski, fully-hopeless protagonist. Who, let’s not split hairs, is a creep through and through – every dude in this film is. But there’s something oddly vulnerable and relatable to him – until he utters something else awful, that is.

Also, the soundtrack. Oh. My. The soundtrack is just incredible. The original soundtrack that provides the swelling brass sections and tinny anxiety, inducing strings of any classic Marlowe film is deftly sandwiched between a mixture of bizarro trip hop and electro pop that just works so beautifully amongst the smog and sun of LA.

The noir influences are made frightfully obvious. This isn’t a criticism though, Mitchell clearly wanted them front and centre. We get bird-eye views and slow-mo underwater shots, and close-ups in alleyways, and liberal use of the dolly zoom. And all of this looks just phenomenal in the baking heat and chilly nights of LA.

Director: David Robert Mitchell
Writer: David Robert Mitchell
Stars: Andrew Garfield, Riley Keough, Topher Grace