| For a film that consists primarily of an extended car chase from Colorado to California, Vanishing Point (U.S., 1971) certainly boasts a souped-up engine under its hood, one fuelled by high-octane American mythos and combustible countercultural commentary.
As an action movie with aspirations to make its audience think, Vanishing Point might seem unusual by today’s standards, but it bears more than a passing resemblance to two iconic American films of its era. It shares with Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) a willingness to critique the association between the road and liberty in the imagination of the American people. At the same time, its existential subtext is not entirely unlike that seen in Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), which was released later the same year.
In Vanishing Point, a man known only as Kowalski (Barry Newman) gets hepped up on goofballs and bets that he can drive a white Dodge Challenger muscle car from Denver to San Francisco in approximately 15 hours.
Intoxicated by speed (of both the narcotic and mechanical varieties), Kowalski embarks upon an infernal tour not just of the American southwest, but also of his own psyche, with a blind black DJ prophet who goes by the radio handle Super Soul (Clevon Helm) as his only guide. Along the way, Kowalski meets various and sundry mystical figures who may or may not be figments of his own imagination, and is pursued by genuine furies in the shape of state troopers, the veritable embodiment of authority.
With the anti-authoritarian anti-hero Kowalski at its centre, Vanishing Point, as its title might suggest, becomes a meditation on liberty and the disappearing American dream, which somehow manages to continue beckoning from just over the horizon. It’s no surprise, then, that for every revved-up car chase in the film – and there are many – we see several long shots of Kowalski’s white Challenger fading into the distance quite literally at the end of the road. The landscape cinematography is flawless, but its compositional perfection serves primarily to underline a more significant point about the relation between character, environment, perspective and the elusive, self-perpetuating promise of the frontier.
It’s a suitably melancholic vision of America, circa 1970, when it was beginning to become apparent that problems of racial tension, class struggle and other ideological conflict were not going to be solved by the idealistic individualism of the 1960s counterculture. Vanishing Point addresses a number of these issues through various emerging subplots, but the result is an oversimplification of far-too-complex matters. The film would be much better had it remained focused more intently on Kowalski’s alienation.
If Vanishing Point is at all disturbing, it is due to Kowalski’s interminable pursuit of some unattainable desire. Unfortunately, a series of hamfisted flashbacks reveal his past disappointments far too overtly, allowing pat explanations for his troublingly self-destructive behaviour. To put it simply, director Richard C. Sarafian sacrifices the subtleties of character and mood in order to belabour us with his unsophisticated social agenda.
Yet, even though Vanishing Point will never achieve the same notoriety as Easy Rider and doesn’t quite match the existential ennui of Two-Lane Blacktop, it is still an exemplary representative of the road movie genre. If more car chase films were invested with this kind of thought and stylistic panache it wouldn’t be a terrible thing. The 20th Century Fox DVD features excellent transfers of both the U.S. and the U.K. versions of the film, although the differences between them are slight. (The British release includes a scene in which a sexy hitchhiker played by Charlotte Rampling lights up a huge joint.) For true fans of the film, there is also a commentary track by Sarafian, although by the sounds of it, he still doesn’t quite know what the movie is about. |
Copyright ©2004 FFWD. All rights reserved.