>>PREVIEW
DOWN IN THE VALLEY
STARRING Edward Norton, Evan Rachel Wood and David Morse
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY David Jacobson
Opens Friday, June 9
Uptown Screen
The old West ain’t what it used to be. The untamed frontier town has become a sprawling metropolis. The heroic but mysterious gunslinger has all but disappeared. Hell, even Jon Bon Jovi has traded in his trusty steed for a steel horse. Yet, Hollywood’s fascination with the western continues.
From last year’s award-winning Brokeback Mountain, which rewrote the silent cowboy code as an ode to same-sex love, to John Singleton’s Four Brothers, which meshed old west violence with ’70s blaxploitation style, filmmakers still explore the classic archetypes of the western, even if they are disguising it in a contemporary package.
Now, you can add Down in the Valley to that growing list. A tale of doomed love between the impressionable 17-year-old Tobe (Evan Rachel Wood) and a well-meaning but out-of-step drifter Harlan (Edward Norton), the characters inhabit the present day, but the dusty streets and old-fashioned sensibilities recall a time long ago. When tensions flare between the couple and her tough-as-nails dad (David Morse), it’s hard not to see two outlaws battling over the same gal. Trading in the geographic isolation of the old west for the emotional isolation that comes from living in the shadow of a freeway, writer-director David Jacobson says that the nod to classic westerns in Down in the Valley is intentional.
"I think I got really into the genre because there is something very stark and bleak about the world of the western," he says. "The westerns really create a great beauty out of that. That is sort of something I was trying to do in Down in the Valley – take their bleak world and find some kind of beauty in it."
Inspired by his own childhood in the San Fernando Valley, and the constant white noise that came with living mere blocks from the freeway, Jacobson set out to create a film that played with perception. His western angle was inspired by the roster of old dusters he watched while writing the script, but the characters aren’t nearly as one-dimensional. Harlan is well-meaning but potentially dangerous, and Tobe is naive yet mature beyond her years. Both Norton and Wood imbue the roles with a human insecurity, but Jacobson’s track record shows that layered characters (with a potentially misaligned ethical compass) are almost his trademarks.
"I always want to do that with all the characters. I just find it much more interesting – that kind of moral ambiguity in the film. I just think characters are more interesting that way. I guess I see so many comic book movies… and even in our politics – everything gets divided into good and evil.
"I just find that kind of shallow and ultimately kind of boring. I just like it when the characters confuse you a little bit. Good people or bad people – you have to think about it."
The film is rounded out with great supporting performances by Morse, Rory Culkin (as Tobe’s long-suffering brother) and Bruce Dern like most westerns, the landscape plays a pivotal role as well. But instead of the spires of Monument Valley that were made famous in the films of John Ford, Jacobson turns his lens on the sprawling asphalt and towering overpasses of Van Nuys, California.
"I got really into the locations of the film," he says. "It is all shot in and around the San Fernando Valley and I found all sorts of places I never knew existed when I was growing up there. I think it’s neat when you see movies in places that you’ve seen millions of movies, like L.A. and you sort of see it in a new way. I was trying to find visions of L.A. that people aren’t used to seeing."
Turning Van Nuys into a sunburned boom town using a neo-western lens may seem like a bit of a stretch to some, but as Jacobson points out, he lives in a country led by a president whose foreign policy has quite a bit in common with the old west. By taking cinematic archetypes that have been with us for almost a century, and toying with our preconceptions, Down in the Valley gives Jacobson a chance to hold a mirror up to society, even if he is dealing with characters on the fringe.
"I have always been into countercultural heroes," he says. "When I grew up, I was really into punk rock and punk music so maybe from the very start, I was into anti-establishment things. When you go to the edges of our culture, you often find things about the centre. So in a way, you are never really leaving the very century of the culture."
CELEB TOP FIVE
The Top Five favourite westerns of David Jacobson, director of Down in the Valley:
1. My Darling Clementine
2. Shane
3. Red River
4. Unforgiven
5. The Searchers |
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