Tease and tease all you like, but at some point you have to deliver.
Cluttered with one half-baked half-scene, half-hallucination after another, “Under the Silver Lake” ultimately falls flat due to an emotionally disconnected lead character named Sam (Andrew Garfield), one too many trips to the wacky well and a reveal that generates about as much excitement as a slide show presentation on the history of accounting.
Yes, Sam is a guy who loves movies – lotta Hitchcock love here, and, for some reason, a Hitchcock tombstone. He also has a thing for a beautiful young blonde named Sarah (Riley Keough) who lives not far from him in the same seedy LA apartment complex – is there any other kind? Somehow, they get together for a night of almost something and then – poof! – she vanishes. Intrigued – and horny – Sam puts on his private eyes and goes looking for her.
There are nods to films like “Rear Window”, “Vertigo” and “The Long Goodbye.” That’s a shame because all of those movies are light years better than writer/director David Robert Mitchell’s bloated, at times silly, but mostly boring 139 minutes of LA weirdness.
In their films, Hitchcock and Altman both had the sense to create a lead character who was, not only, deeply emotionally consumed by the ongoing mystery, but also deeply emotionally connected to the resolution of that mystery. It had to bring them to their knees – sometimes never to get back up again.
In UTSL, Sam’s connection to Sarah is too slight, on both a physical and emotional level. Consequently, this makes our amateur cinephile sleuth’s journey and ultimate unraveling of the mystery feel a little bit like attending the funeral of a person you barely knew – the emotions are mostly something you see rather than feel. No surprise – Sam spends an awful lot of time seeing without feeling, which, in lead character terms is about as useful as a blindfold in a blackout.
Do yourself a favour and watch “Rear Window” (1954) or “Vertigo” (1958) or Altman’s 1973 classic with the great Elliot Gould, in his prime, instead. They deliver.
