The Canyons

Paul Schrader – 2013 – USA

Embattled director Paul Schrader memorializes the death of film culture by releasing his new film on-line simultaneous with (and to augment) an extremely limited theatrical distribution and surely guaranteeing a greater audience.  In case there is any doubt about Schrader’s dire theme, both the opening and closing credits appear over numerous shots of defunct movie theaters; shuttered, vandalized, abandoned movie shrines, some in small towns, some quite famous.  They are wholly unrelated to the film’s plot, which only underscores the premise more cynically; the characters are in the film business but care nothing for it.  They’re in it to assuage their boredom, to make a little money, to acquire some power or fame, but they neither know films, watch films, enjoy films nor are ever shown actually making them.  Christian (James Deen), a rich young man living on a trust-fund controlled by his father, is a producer of cheap pulp movies.  His girlfriend Tara (Lindsay Lohan) is a former aspiring actress who has latched onto Christian as a source of financial security.  Their relationship is painfully hollow and dysfunctional; they can barely relate intimately or emotionally, especially when alone.  To compensate, Christian pressures Tara into various hook-ups with random strangers; girls, boys, threesomes, foursomes, fueled by alcohol and cocaine.  Christian is a stereotype of the neurotic, possessive male who has no comprehension of women despite always needing them around.  His paranoia about Tara’s affair with Ryan (Nolan Gerard Funk), a struggling actor, escalates through mind games, stalking, hacking and eventually violence.  There are echoes of Schrader’s American Gigolo (1980) with its air of artificial L.A. chic, even down to a scene of the hero being followed on a city street and pursued into a record shop.  There is an amateurish quality to the acting that – along with Schrader’s languid style – will probably put off many viewers accustomed to being pulled through movies with lots of noise and flash, but I found it strangely appropriate and naturalistic.  After all, in real life people don’t orate like Pacino doing Mamet all day long; they splutter, make dumb faces and use words and grammar haphazardly.  Schrader’s approach to the performances is surely deliberate, not indifferent as some have claimed.  The evidence of this is the fact that his two stars are, to some extent, outsider thespians; Deen, a famous porn star, and Lohan, a notorious tabloid train wreck.  In terms of actors, resources and shooting methods, I feel that Schrader is dismantling the trimmings of professionalism in order to investigate what remains that he recognizes as cinema.  Despite its shoestring budget, the film is told in Schrader’s characteristic elegant and formal style; a welcome return-to-form after the unfortunate embrace of the trendy “shaky-cam” approach of Adam Resurrected (2008).  The style is languorous and well-suited to Schrader’s theme of alienation and artistic ennui.  Romantic gestures between characters are weak and half-hearted, sex is grim and unsatisfying, but the cynicism on display is what Schrader sees happening to his beloved cinema; it is not his own.  He still wants to make films, films that are rigorous and cinematic regardless of changing shooting methods and means of distribution.  With The Canyons I think he is saying that he will persist and that the art form he believes in can continue and evolve even as celluloid and art-houses fade into disuse.