Review
THE UNITED STATES OF LELAND
Starring Ryan Gosling, Don Cheadle and Jena Malone
Directed by Matthew Ryan Hoge
Opens Friday, April 16
Uptown Screen
Y kant acturs reed? First Ben Affleck and Matt Damon inflicted Project Greenlight upon us – an Internet screenwriting contest that yielded the sticky-sweet Stolen Summer and The Battle of Shaker Heights. Now Kevin Spacey’s Trigger Street experiment has produced The United States of Leland, an indie so earnest and prototypical it should come with free flannel shirts.
Judging from his career, Spacey’s never been one to care how good a script is so long as he gets to play the asshole in it with all the best lines. Surprise, surprise – he makes a guest appearance here as the asshole father of Leland (Ryan Gosling), a quiet teenager who murders the retarded brother of his girlfriend (Jena Malone) for no apparent reason. (I say "retarded" because that’s how everyone in the film refers to the boy. Some reviewers have called him autistic, but who am I to dole out a more politically correct diagnosis?)
The movie is about the effect this murder has on the girlfriend’s screwed-up family – she’s doing heroin, her sister (Michelle Williams) is drifting apart from her boyfriend (Chris Klein) who’s estranged from his own family, and so on – as well as Leland’s uneasy relationship with his teacher in prison (Don Cheadle), a guy trying to rationalize his own evildoings as he cheats on his out-of-town girlfriend and targets Leland as the subject of his next book. Leland and his teacher’s debates about optimism versus fatalism are the most interesting parts of the film, and even these scenes are stilted as hell.
Cheadle manages to bring grace to his thankless role, but otherwise it’s tragic watching all the talented indie actors flailing about. Gosling turns in a particularly disappointing performance. After his focused ferocity in The Believer, perhaps he felt the need to ping-pong to a character he could make serenely stupid. But his Leland is so blasé, he often seems half asleep, which is just how you’ll feel watching him. It’s a deliberate acting choice, and an awful one.
The music in the film wildly overcompensates for Leland’s apparent lack of emotion. Under virtually every scene, we hear the sort of minor-key, plinky-plunk indie guitar that tells us no one’s going to be having any fun here. Of course, the music also signals that there might be more to Leland under his apathetic exterior. Sure enough, after all the hubbub about not being able to know what turned Leland into a killer, the movie ends up offering the cheesiest, most Hollywood explanation yet: it’s not that Leland can’t feel, it’s that he feels too much.
This kind of holier-than-thou indie crap is enough to make you yearn for the next flatulent studio epic. |
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