Surveillance
- Directed by Jennifer Lynch
- Written by Jennifer Lynch and Kent Harper
- Starring Bill Pullman, Julia Ormond, Ryan Simpkins
- Classification: 18A
This one, it seems, is for the folks in Regina.
At least that's the impression left by what's printed at the end of the credit roll for Surveillance : "Special thanks to the People of Regina without whose support and true passion this film would not have been possible."
That is a whole lot of gratitude to lay on the Queen City of the Plains. But are its citizens going to feel all that thankful for showing "true passion" once they've actually seen Surveillance , which was shot in and around Regina in 2007, with production help from SaskFilm and the Canadian Film/Video Production Tax Credit?
It seems unlikely. While Saskatchewan looks great here, all clear light and big sky and unending space, it's at the service of an awfully awful film - a loopy 97-minute gorefest that likely wouldn't have been made had director Jennifer Lynch not got dad David Lynch to serve as executive producer and high-calibre actors Julia Ormond and Bill Pullman to star.
Surveillance , in fact, had its world premiere more than a year ago, at the 2008 Cannes festival. But it's only getting its commercial release now - a sign, perhaps, that not a few potential distributors may have been put off by the movie's blend of Grand Guignol theatrics, dark humour and Sadean transgression.
In other words, Surveillance is very Lynchian. David Lynchian, that is, right down to its characters' fondness for "a good cup of coffee." (He even wrote and sings [!]the creepy tune, Speed Roadster, that tracks the closing credits.) Unfortunately, daughter Jen fails, as she did in her previous directorial outing, the execrable Boxing Helena from 1993, to bring the wit, surreal logic and weird serenity that infuses her poppa's best work.
With Saskatchewan standing in for the lost highways of the U.S. Midwest, her movie's a cartoonish celebration of menace, mayhem and murder, centred on the efforts of two ostensible FBI agents (Pullman and Ormond) to solve a series of grisly killings, the most recent of which, a roadside slaughter, has claimed the lives of a cop (French Stewart), a kid (Kyle Briere), his mom (Cheri Oteri), his stepfather (Hugh Dillon), a junkie (Mac Miller) and a couple in their 20s (Anita Smith, Josh Strait).
The twist here is that three people have both survived and witnessed these deaths, but each - an eight-year-old girl (Ryan Simpkins), the junkie's girlfriend (Pell James), the cop's partner (co-writer Kent Harper) - brings his or her own fabrications, limitations and interpretations to the testimony they're recounting before the cameras Pullman and Ormond have set up in three separate interrogation rooms. If you're thinking Rashomon at this point, congratulations. Like that classic, Surveillance unfolds through a patchwork of flashbacks that reveal the fault lines in each character's version of the truth while simultaneously nudging the narrative into the present and toward the film's supposedly surprising conclusion.
Only it's not a surprise. Horrific, yes. Almost pornographic, in fact. But by the time we approach the, um, climax, Lynch has piled up (and piled on) so many corpses that, just by a process of elimination, the whodunits have become as clearly marked as a Tim Hortons exit sign on the Trans-Canada. And as for the whydunit, there's not much to go to because Lynch and Harper don't give the viewer much to go on beyond, I suppose, the vagaries of middle-aged craziness.
Lynch does demonstrate some talent in Surveillance. Blood arcs, splays and goops nicely; her script is studded with eccentric banter ("Bring the butter; we're havin' toast, just the way you like it," says Pullman to Ormond) and sharp exchanges (Harper: "I'm a good cop." Pullman: "That's a total oxymoron.") Finally, though, the carnage is at once too over-the-top and too calculated to be truly unsettling. You end up worrying more about what makes Jennifer Lynch tick than wondering about the clockwork orange of her characters. Whether madcap parody - the American Psycho of G-man flicks - or walk on the wild side of Lynch's obsessions, the film's a failure.