Storyville

Mark Frost – 1992 – USA

For some reason, I keep expecting this film to acquire a new life as time goes on, that it might earn a modest kind of reputation as a forgotten gem.  I suppose it's mostly because of the talent involved that I think that, but the truth of the matter is that it was underwhelming in 1992 and it remains so today.  It is one of several films of the time that seemed to be offshoots of the Twin Peaks craze of 1990 and '91.  Storyville is written and directed by Twin Peaks' co-creator Mark Frost and boasts the show's Piper Laurie and Michael Parks among its cast, but that's more-or-less where the connections dwindle away.  Set in Louisiana, it tells the story of an ambitious young politician (James Spader) caught up in all kinds of corruption after he is implicated in the death of a woman not-his-wife with whom he spent the night.  Partially due to Spader's indolent persona and substantially due to Frost's lack of cinematic vision, the film becomes little more than a who-done-it procedural only occasionally punctuated by local color like jazz music and murky swamps.  It seems to me that such a milieu and actors like Laurie and Jason Robards should be the recipe for a powerful drama, but instead everything just trudges towards the unfortunate decision to make the climax of the film consist of a long courtroom scene, chock full of all the clichés you can imagine; pointed fingers, emotional outbursts, shocking revelations and even some gunfire.  There's something lazy about the whole thing, as though a ton of talent was assembled but then no one took the initiative to make sure than something special would happen, and by "no one" I really mean Mark Frost, who has to take responsibility for the film's failure just as he would deserve the credit if it was great.  It doesn't seem to be an irrelevant fact that Storyville was his last and only time directing a feature.  I seem to recall there might have been scuttlebutt at the time about Frost resenting Lynch getting all the credit for Twin Peaks, but unfortunately, in trying to compete with Lynch in the world of cinema, he made a huge miscalculation, because Lynch is a genius and one of the greatest auteurs of the 80s and 90s; Frost might have been wiser to accept his limitations in lieu of making a weak film.