MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: LINDSAY AND THE PORN STAR

The operating thesis of The Canyons is that movies are awful, the people who make them are awful, and the culture that permits their continued existence is awful. It is perhaps a keen example of form reflecting content, therefore, that The Canyons is itself pretty goddamn awful; and given who director Paul Schrader is, it's possible that this really is deliberate. It is even more possible, particularly given that legendary New York Times Magazine piece from January, that it was such a strained, miserable experience that a certain raging anger could not help but saturate every frame and every cut, and that The Canyons is an unwatchable, miserable piece of crap because it was poorly made.

The genesis of the thing is a gnarled mess, but let's not bother recapping it here. Instead, let's dive right in where the film does: a non-diegetic montage of decaying movie theaters, a motif that the film will return to for individual, equally non-diegetic shots, and eventually a second montage during the end credits. "Movies are dead", says The Canyons, in a stripped-down, dead-eyed way; it is an empty pessismism sharp and bleak even for the world's most famous filmmaking ex-Calvinist, and reliably misanthropic writer Bret Easton Ellis. And having claimed that movies are dead, The Canyons immediately attempts to prove it, in an opening scene that sets the film off on a monumentally poor footing from which it never recovers. We're at a dinner party in a gorgeous but somewhat icy Los Angeles home, where four movie people are chatting: the producer, Christian (James Deen, America's most beloved "boy next door" porn star) is busily telling his assistant Gina (Amanda Brooks) and her boyfriend, his new lead actor Ryan (Nolan Funk), all about his adoration of swinging and casual sex with strangers in the home and bed he shares with co-producer Tara (Lindsay Lohan), who can't get a word in edgewise and grows increasingly brittle as the night wears on. A few things clearly announce themselves immediately: Deen has an unbelievably literal understanding of how to play a menacing bad boy, Funk can't out-act a porn star, and Lohan, permitted to do her own make-up, felt that enormous silent vamp cat eyes were exactly the right choice. And while, thankfully, this never crops again, it's all you can stare at or think about for what seems like 10 solid minutes of endless exposition delivered in a glowering monotone by Deen.

To be fair, The Canyons is never as unwatchable as this opening scene, but it's never as captivatingly bad, either. For something that seems so rife with possibilities for outrageous camp or deliciously comic smut, the film is paralyzingly mordant and bitter in execution, and above all else, boring. Schrader's clever enough to predict his audience's prurient desires (Lohan's ample breasts, Deen's enormous dick, sweaty sex scenes between them and each other and numerous other characters) to punish us by withholding them as long as possible, or by making them joyless, which means that even on the meager level of exploitative trash, The Canyons simply doesn't have any juice. The actors are all weak and stilted without being particularly funny in a The Room sort of way, and Lohan - who does, perhaps against expectations, give the best performance in the movie - is more tragic than anything else. The girl looks like she's been rode hard and put away wet, as they say; 26 years old at the time of shooting, the actress looks like a particularly dazed 40-year-old, the final nail in the coffin of a career that seemed so intoxicating in its promise and freshness back in the Mean Girls days, if there was any lingering doubt left. She has a movie star's ability to command the camera, but it's mixed with obvious desperation and fatigue, and it's not so much that Lohan's performance looks effortful, as it is wearisome to watch.

That the film isn't trashy and fun is one thing, and given the haranguing, moralising tendencies of the authors, not very surprising: that it's so outlandishly repetitive and boring is quite another thing entirely. Whatever little point the film has to make, it makes quickly: Hollywood types are sexually exploitative scum who can't feel feelings but just ragefuck each other into oblivion. That message, mixed and remixed, is a lot to stomach for 100 minutes, particularly with Schrader and his crew heads - cinematographer John DeFazio, production designer Stephanie Gordon - so apparently hellbent on making the most generic, empty version of Los Angeles they can manage, fascinating only in brief moments where its very cheapness (and, we must be fair, The Canyons was an exorbitantly cheap motion picture) enforces a kind of neo-realist awareness of space; the stores and public spaces of L.A. depicted with a plainness and honesty that movies try their absolute best to never depict. But that's not much of a compensation for how barbarically dull all of the first hour is, basically until the showstopper sex scene where Tara finally calls Christian out on his nastiness and flips the switch in his head that turns this nominal thriller into an actual thriller, as the sexually jealous soul-dead monster takes steps to punish everyone who disagrees with him.

The third of The Canyons that's kind of a thriller isn't any more effective as cinema than the two-thirds that are just angry and miserable, but at least it feels like it has a shape and momentum. It's not thrilling; the only scene that feels like it could work (a shock stabbing) undone by a certain mechanical streak in the direction. Though at least it threatens to pay off Deen's one-note acting by suggesting that it's based in actual psychosis, and makes the character something at all besides punishingly selfish male sexuality without pleasure. That's pretty much the best way I could sum up the entire movie, and while I get that being unpleasurable is the "point", being uninteresting surely couldn't have been. And for Schrader and Ellis, in their grubby wallow in D-grade noir cruelty, even human depravity and darkness can be rendered uninteresting if there's too much of it with too little creativity to spice it up.

2/10