With a production as troubled as its star Lindsay Lohan, this un-erotic thriller is best viewed as a ghastly tableaux of the damned
Cinema bows out with both a whimper and a bang in The Canyons, a punch-drunk and jaundiced piece of Hollywood noir that opens with a montage of ruined movie theatres and then proceeds to an orgy up in Beverly Hills. Director Paul Schrader is our guide through the rubble, working off an overwrought script from Bret Easton Ellis. The imperilled cast comes headed by wayward Lindsay Lohan and the smirking, blandly handsome James Deen, a veteran of the porn industry. All of them are going down, stuck together, and their dying fall commands a certain queasy fascination.
Schrader's picture flops into an out-of-competition slot at the Venice film festival off the back of a spectacularly troubled production history that has been partly blamed on the presence of Lohan, an actor still struggling to regain her equilibrium following spells in rehab and under house arrest. And yet, curiously, these offscreen torments have not so much destroyed the film as defined it. The Canyons gives us an erotic thriller in which the thrills have lost their force, the sex has lost its zest and the actual business of making movies is little more than an annoying distraction. The whole thing works best when viewed as a ghastly, frozen tableaux of the damned. Judged as drama, The Canyons sucks.
Lohan, her eyes darting, her hoop earrings twitching, plays Tara, the trophy girlfriend of amoral Christian (Deen), who lives in a soulless pleasure dome in the Hollywood Hills. It transpires that Tara is having an affair with the lunkish Ryan (Nolan Gerard Funk), but that's OK because Christian is having an affair with his yoga teacher Cynthia (Tenille Houston). And Cynthia, we later discover, once had an affair with Ryan and may want to again. It's hard to keep track of just who's betraying who; tough to spot where one transgression ends and the other begins. The four protagonists inhabit an ass-backwards world of ongoing fakery, all strung out beneath gunmetal skies. One has the sense that they cry to make themselves cry and use sex as a device to jump-start flaccid libidos. In the midst of a hellish orgy, Tara abruptly looks into the face of the man who's astride her and murmurs "Hello", as if she's noticing him for the first time.
Would it be redundant to mention that the acting is awful? These people are unconvincing as people, and that may be the point. Ellis's dialogue is so stilted and overwritten that it reduces the performers to gabbling wrecks, desperately rushing headlong at their lines. All of which is of a piece, but that doesn't make it good. Near the end of the film, sleazy Christian takes a drive into town for a meeting with the director Gus Van Sant, who apparently moonlights as a sensitive shrink. The two men sit inside a quiet, book-lined study as Christian outlines his various issues. "We're all actors, aren't we?" he asks the director. But Van Sant won't be provoked. He responds with a frown and his silence speaks volumes.
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