Driveways: Park yourself in front of this one!

Driveways (2019) • View trailer 
Four stars. Not rated, but with some blunt profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.22.20

There are movie stars, and there are actors.

And, rarely, there are actors: the wielders of true magic. The ones who slide into a role with such smoothness — such casual subtlety — that you’re not even aware of the craft on display. You simply spend time with that character.

When Del (Brian Dennehy) realizes that a friend has failed to provide a promised ride,
Kathy (Hong Chau) grudgingly agrees to drive him ... in part because her son,
Cody (Lucas Jaye), insists that it's the right thing to do.

I first clocked Brian Dennehy in 1978’s Foul Play, when his small supporting role — jostling for attention among scene-stealers Chevy Chase, Goldie Hawn and Dudley Moore — nonetheless registered. Considerably, in fact; he was the one authentic human being among exaggerated burlesques. It was a clever move by writer/director Colin Higgins, because it allowed Dennehy to stand out.

He probably caught the attention of most moviegoers as the overzealous, hard-ass sheriff in 1982’s First Blood, which kick-started Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo franchise. Dennehy’s CV since then has been far too impressive to cite here: always engaging, always enjoyable. Even when he was just larking about — as in the two F/X films he made with Bryan Brown — the work was solid. He became that guy.

His film work was eclipsed by a stage career that netted two Tony Awards, for Death of a Salesman and Long Day’s Journey into Night.

Dennehy died on April 20 — 81 years old, and still too young — but he left us with one final sterling performance, in director Andrew Ahn’s sensitive indie drama, Driveways.

The achingly poignant Hannah Bos/Paul Thureen script is buoyed further by co-stars Hong Chau and Lucas Jaye. Although additional characters briefly drift in and out, this is essentially a three-hander: a delicate, intimate study of loneliness and regret, and the healing power of simply reaching out.

Ahn wastes no time in back-story. Single parent Kathy (Chau) and her young son Cody (Jaye), after a long drive, pull into the driveway of her long-estranged and recently deceased older sister. Night has fallen, and Kathy’s body language is reluctant, resigned but grimly resolute; Cody has the morose face of an adult who hasn’t experienced enough joy.

The long-retired Del (Dennehy), living along next door, notes their arrival.

Arrangements, obviously made in haste, are incomplete; Kathy and Cody aren’t able to get inside. They back-track to a cheap motel, and return — better prepared — in the morning. Once inside, they’re greeted by a hoarder’s nightmare; the house is wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling with junk and debris that completely conceals what once must’ve been a cheerful, cozy home.

Inherent Vice: A very bad trip

Inherent Vice (2014) • View trailer 
2.5 stars. Rated R, for profanity, graphic nudity, sexual content, constant drug use and occasional violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.23.15

This deranged flick is best imagined as an unholy love child spawned by Chinatown and every Sam Spade novel Dashiell Hammett never wrote.

Glimpsed through a peyote haze.

Private detective Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix, left) and maritime lawyer Sauncho
Smilax (Benicio Del Toro) watch from an oceanside restaurant as a suspicious
schooner — recently re-christened the Golden Fang — makes its way into port,
its purpose certain to be illicit.

Thomas Pynchon is challenging under the best of circumstances, which also can be said of director/scripter Paul Thomas Anderson, whose oeuvre features aggressively peculiar films such as Magnolia, There Will Be Blood and The Master. Put these two eclectic minds together, and the results are far from the best of circumstances.

At its better moments, Anderson’s take on Pynchon’s Inherent Vice is a funny pastiche of 1940s film noir atmosphere and attitude, filtered through the drug-hazed cheesecloth of 1970s hippiefied Los Angeles. The characters are manic, the dialog heightened far beyond stratospheric visibility, and the unfolding plot a crazy-quilt conspiracy that gets more flamboyantly, hilariously preposterous by the minute.

You can’t help admiring the self-indulgent audacity ... except, well, too much rapidly becomes way too much. The stoner somnambulance through which every character delivers his lines becomes trés tedious, and a tedious film wears out its welcome long before the clock winds down on its 148-minute running time.

Anderson, it should be noted, never makes short films. He should consider doing so.

Pynchon’s 2009 novel exists in the same seemingly random, psychedelic fever that was typical of Richard Brautigan’s work in the 1960s and ’70s. If so-called “free jazz” is music without melody, then Brautigan’s prose was words without context: sentences strung together solely to befuddle and amuse. Brautigan was adored by the counter-counter set, who no doubt found his books far more compelling when read aloud under the influence of LSD.

Inherent Vice is similarly haphazard, with bizarre characters wandering into our protagonist’s landscape like the pink elephants that haunt somebody enduring delirium tremens. We must consider Pynchon’s history: As we’re reminded in a delightful December analysis in the Los Angeles Times, Pynchon’s third novel, 1973’s Gravity’s Rainbow, won the National Book Award ... “and caused the Pulitzer Committee to cancel that year’s fiction prize after it found the book ‘unreadable’ and ‘obscene.’ ”

Inherent Vice is somewhat more coherent, but that’s not saying much. Indeed, it could be argued that the entire story is a marijuana-induced nightmare experienced by main character Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix): In other words, nothing that we see is real. The film dares us to imagine this from the very first scene, as Doc views the unexpected arrival of former girlfriend Shasta Fay (Katherine Wilson) with surprise, and she murmurs, almost to herself, “Thinks he’s hallucinating.”

That notion likely will make the film work better for some viewers, but it’s too easy an explanation. More complicated is the possibility that some of what we see is real ... and some isn’t.

I’ve serious doubts, for example, about the actual existence of Sortilège (Joanna Newsom), who both narrates this saga — providing indispensable linking commentary that helps us over the rough spots — and serves as Doc’s sounding board. Eventually, it seems odd that nobody else seems to interact with Sortilège, suggesting that she’s the personification of Doc arguing with himself.

Perhaps.