Monte Hellman’s Road to Nowhere (2010)

Iconic director Monte Hellman’s first feature in more than two decades is a confounding and complex beast of a movie… and it’s magnificent. Road to Nowhere is a noirish romantic thriller that uses a variety of story telling levels to tell the shady tale of a notorious North Carolina murder mystery involving an insurance fraud that left multiple people dead and multiple millions missing. Like many classic Noirs, Road to Nowhere plays out along several distinct story lines – real time, flashback and, in this case, a kind of cinematic time that represents the quasi-reality of a docudrama about the mystery being shot by the lead characters. It’s a film that requires your complete attention because the stories and characters intermingle in unexpected and sometimes unusual ways leading up to a climax that creates more uncertainty than it dispels.

Road to Nowhere is a film in love with the art and artistry of cinema. Like a set of nesting Russian dolls, Hellman and writer Steven Gaydos construct one film inside another (and then perhaps another) and the film has strong thematic links to such classics as Vertigo, Rashomon, Contempt and Day for Night . It is an original and artistically courageous work from a director that has often polarized mainstream critics. Hellman might be best known for the celebrated Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) and Cockfighter (1974), films that in many ways helped define the mood of an entire era. Since then, he’s had an on again/off again relationship with directing that begs comparisons with Samuel Fuller’s later career.

Road to Nowhere is Hellman’s most daring, experimental and uncompromising film yet, and like his earlier works, this one garnered mixed reviews as well. The film it might share the most common ground with is David Lynch’s ethereal Mulholland Drive, another nonlinear, mind-teasing work that challenges its audience to be part of the creative process. It’s either telling multiple stories or presenting multiple takes on one story: the fallout from a film being made about a crooked politician, a femme fatale, murder, suicide and possible resurrection. The director of this film-within-a-film becomes obsessed with his leading actress and the lines begin to blur between the events they’re filming and the people involved in the production itself. The director’s obsession with his faux-femme fatale starts to affect his judgment and even though it’s happening right in front of him, he can’t see the dangers unfolding all around. The film calls into question our perceptions of reality and how persuasive cinema can be in forming those perceptions. It doesn’t start as one, but Road to Nowhere quietly morphs into a metaphysical thriller and it ends with a monumental mind-fuck in the final ten minutes that forces you to reconsider the entire premise of the film. I’ve never seen anything quite so subtle (it’s a 2 second panning shot) serve to undermine my sense of what had gone on before.

I’m not sure if you can call Road to Nowhere a masterpiece, but it comes damn close. At the very least it has the most descriptive and accurate 3 word title of the year. It’s a film that demands several viewings and I’m fairly certain that my take on what happens might change on another pass. From the extended and static opening shot to the final frame of a prison door, I was never less than mesmerized by Hellman’s layered storytelling. It alternated between being frustratingly-oblique to utterly compelling in roughly equal turns and as a result, I’m not sure who it might appeal to. The more films you’ve experienced, the better I think it might play. On some level, it also appears to be a cautionary tale for those who watch too much cinema, but it had the opposite effect on me. I want to watch more now.

The hair of the dog as they say.