With the gridlock of hoopla and scandal surrounding The Canyons – a new drama from writer Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho) and director Paul Schrader (American Gigolo) that stars Lindsay Lohan and renowned porn star James Deen – you’d be forgiven for entering the theater, or entering “Purchase” on your VOD device of choice, with a certain amount of expectation. Whether you thought you’d hate it, laugh at it or defend it just to prove your total lack of cynicism, you should probably dash those preconceived notions now. The Canyons isn’t worth any emotional response more meaningful than malaise.
Conveying poorly motivated, misanthropic melancholy seems to be Schrader’s and Ellis’s intent throughout The Canyons, and to their credit they succeed to a very wild degree, but to what end is a mystery. If the big reveal is that people can be directionless, vindictive, untrustworthy and shallow, there are more interesting ways to dramatize it. The Canyons has the low-fi production value of a student film that got way out of hand, and all of the immature sincerity you would expect to find in that kind of amateurish debut.
And yet, Paul Schrader knows filmmaking better than that. Or at least he’d better, since he wrote Taxi Driver. So it’s reasonable to assume that large portions of The Canyons’ strange tone, stilted performances and mostly drab cinematography are intentional artistic choices, probably meant to mirror the off-putting, self-involved and relatively pointless lives of its protagonists.
Conceptually that might be considered a stroke of genius, but in practice Schrader has simply made a film that can neither contextualize nor properly judge, kindly or cruelly, the behavior contained therein, or indeed any audience that might relate to the characters’ various plights. In other words, The Canyons feels exactly like the film that the characters in The Canyons would have made about themselves, and that’s a bad thing.
The Canyons opens with a title sequence of beautiful but dilapidated movie theaters, implying perhaps the downfall of cinema itself, or at least the downfall of Hollywood as an entity. Perhaps the characters in The Canyons are symbolically to blame. James Deen plays Christian, a disinterested movie producer financing a low budget horror movie to placate his unseen father and justify his own trust fund holdings. He’s dating Tara, played by Lindsay Lohan. A failed actress turned live-in trophy girlfriend, she mooches off of Christian’s millions and agrees, mostly without protest, to a series of trysts with strangers off the internet.
Meanwhile, Nolan Funk plays Ryan, the star of Christian’s film who used to date Tara and currently sleeps with her behind Christian’s back. Although Christian and Tara have an ostensibly open relationship, in practice Christian’s alpha male possessiveness is barely kept in check. The juxtaposition of sexual freedom and emotional infidelity comprises most of the drama in The Canyons, but it’s based two simplistic observations: first, that possessiveness is a bad thing (well, obviously) and second, that Christian’s attempts to divorce sex from intimacy are failing him to a tragic degree.
True, Deen’s callous exterior masks a more interesting psychological entity inside, and for the most part he emerges as the film’s breakout star. Christian is more vulnerable than he lets on, but detached enough to convert those emotions into cruel manipulations and eventually violence. Deen’s scenes with Lohan feel genuine – for genuinely self-involved, hard to watch characters at least – and his one, subdued scene with Gus Van Sant, playing Christian’s psychologist, has a modicum of fair insight. But he and (most of) the rest of the cast are let down by awkward dialogue, meandering pacing and a plot that would have made an exciting 20-minute short film but feels ultimately flimsy for a full-length feature.
It’s hard to argue that The Canyons isn’t a work of singular vision. It just doesn’t envision anything of interest. Paul Schrader’s film toys with meaningful human connections (or rather, their absence) and their perceived relationship with a city, industry and environment that tears human frailty to shreds, but the filmmakers never bolster that theme with a plot that’s involving enough to propel The Canyons from one scene to the next. Deen and Lohan make the most of this material (the rest of the cast often does not) but two good leads are not enough to make The Canyons feel like anything but a failed experiment in intentional low-budget pretentiousness.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
