Don't call it a comeback: 22 years since his last film, which sadly happened to be the third chapter in the Silent Night, Deadly Night series, Monte Hellman returns with Road to Nowhere, a slippery near-masterwork that turns his realist sensibilities in on themselves to depict fractured, imagined realities, a film within a film and a nightmare inside a conjured dream; a lively game of "fuck the facts", as one character puts it. Proudly self-reflexive, the narrative concerns a director who falls for his starlet during the making of a deeply amateurish ripped-from-the-headlines dramatic thriller concerning a supposed double-suicide enacted by a May-September couple guilty of embezzlement, corruption, and murder, amongst other things. The director, a fictionalized younger mirror of Hellman named Mitchell Haven (Tygh Runyan), begins to shift the film away from a plot-driven narrative and trains his filmmaking on his muse, neophyte actress Laurel (Shannyn Sossamon). Laurel's role, that of Velma Duran, the fairer half of the doomed couple at the center of Haven's film (which is also called "Road to Nowhere"), is doubled when it is suggested that she might in fact be the real-life Velma Duran, being followed by an insurance investigator doubling as a consultant on the film (Waylon Payne, who portrayed Jerry Lee Lewis in Walk the Line). A great deal of the film consists of depicting the ins and outs of filmmaking: Multiple takes, running dailies, script problems, framing decisions, etc. Road to Nowhere succeeds where so many behind-the-scenes, meta-genre flicks have failed in portraying the film as a constantly evolving object capable of sudden aesthetic and narrative mutations at any moment.
That being said, it wouldn't be unfair to call Road to Nowhere a meta-noir, as the nocturnal settings and wiredrawn storylines yield some haunting moments, as Laurel grows closer with her director, forms a legitimately odd father-daughter bond with her male co-star (Cliff De Young), who also plays the supposedly real-life version of his character as well, and attempts to avoid Payne's elusive investigator. No one, not even Haven or his screenwriter (Rob Kolar), has a genuine relationship with the investigator, mostly due to the fact that he is after the simple facts, rather than the essence or "feel" of the story -- a crucial scene revolves around his attempts to drag the director and the starlet to the site of one of the real-life couple's major crimes. The only person who seems to be somewhat on his wavelength (and also in his bed) is a video blogger (1990s it-girl Dominique Swain), who has posted conspiracy theories about the couple's crimes, which includes faking their own deaths.
Fictions and realities collide, react, and expand in Road to Nowhere, which can make for an extremely frustrating and confusing watch for those who need clear delineations between the two. Hellman's best films (Two-Lane Blacktop, the recently rediscovered Cockfighter) convey a potent sense of accuracy in portraying Middle America and the South through their more radical and eccentric occupants. In this, Hellman shares something with the great documentary filmmaker Errol Morris; like Morris, who is only four years Hellman's junior, Hellman has grown a curious fascination with various tools of depiction. The blogger's entries, the screenwriter's constantly revised script, Haven's aesthetic choices, Sossamon's various roles, the investigator's reports, and a video interview between Swain's blogger and Haven are all versions of the same story, molded by these various participants in the same way Hellman and cinematographer Josep M. Civit sculpt their damp, saturnine images.
Shot on the cheap with DSLR cameras (which basically look like still photography cameras, only slightly larger), Road to Nowhere is not so much an artist's return to his roots after two decades of abandoned projects as it is an immensely ambitious volt into the modern, foggy miasma of corrupted interpretation. This is not to say that bloggers and screenwriters purposefully or wrongly distort the truth but rather to suggest that these fictions, interacting with one another, hit notes of regret, confusion, pain, obsession, and cowardice that wouldn't be as palpable and honest in a straight-laced version of the film. The settings of the South -- a great deal of action takes place in a enormous two-story hotel where a portion of the cast and crew are staying -- still have an authentic air to them, but this is a long-overdue step forward for Hellman; a dream of Hollywood, with its litany of "based on a true story" tripe, infected and perverted by a rogue, exiled agent, and redeployed as a paranoid nightmare of moviemaking in the digital age.
