The odds were stacked against Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut Lost River from the start. Critics may have been willing to accept the hunk from The Notebook’s transformation into a respectable thespian after a couple of solid performances in Half Nelson and Blue Valentine, but they were hardly going to let him turn auteur without a fight.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt faced similar scepticism when he announced plans to move behind the camera in 2012. Unperturbed, he made Don Jon – a brash, brazen film that answered the question of whether he was ready to add “director” to his résumé with a hyperkinetic montage of hardcore porn and a mile-wide New Jersey accent. Gosling goes just as bold in Lost River, but it’s a boldness of ambition rather than originality. The film was shot by world-renowned cinematographer Benoît Debie, its cast list includes the likes of Christina Hendricks and Ben Mendelsohn, and it premiered last year in a prestigious sidebar at the Cannes film festival.
All of which might seem endearingly audacious had the result somehow managed to live up to such lofty associations. Instead, Lost River is a benchmark of vanity film-making to rival Mariah Carey’s Glitter. Downtown Detroit is 83% black but Gosling populates his version with a bunch of white ciphers who wouldn’t make it past the first draft of Blue Velvet, or Days Of Heaven, or any of the other video-store classics he plunders in search of a sensibility. Mistaking peculiarity for profundity, he lends each character a set of traits possessed by no real human. And though his central thesis – that the American dream has become, get this, an American nightmare – looms large over proceedings, Lost River is driven less by its politics and more by a desire to shoot as much of the film as possible in slow-motion under a neon striplight.
Hendricks, Mendelsohn, Debie and the rest escape unscathed but unexploited – the expensive toys of a child too young to play with them.
Also out this week
Ex Machina British sci-fi with classy arthouse credentials.
American Sniper Jingoistic love letter to America’s deadliest sniper.
Shaun The Sheep Movie Stop-motion blockbuster from lovely Aardman.
