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The Roads Not Taken
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The total effect is to say: yes, this is how we are. Apparently
separated from each other by class, age, gender and any number of other
differences and divisions, but we spring from the same source. We are linked. In reality it is one for all and all for one. Ultimately, that is the
only perspective that makes sense.
– Sally Potter (1994) on Bicycle
Thieves
Sometimes there are complicated narrative films (from
the past decade, Holy Motors [2012] and Road to Nowhere [2010] are examples) that
one can watch and come away, afterwards, with the impression that, more or
less, you got it all – you can cohere the scattered pieces and split levels, at
least. You’re even proud of yourself for grasping – perhaps with some
difficulty, and against the odds – the basic logic of the thing. But then, one
way or another, you discover that you didn’t have that logic right. In fact,
you had it wildly wrong. You cohered an altogether different film in your head,
and now you have to scramble to reorient yourself in relation to the consensus
view (or the Wikipedia summary). It’s not necessarily a nice experience, this
reorientation. Couldn’t I have been left in peace with my perfect fantasy?
This is what happened to me with the odd The Roads Not Taken – despite some
strong moments, and the brave, in-the-moment performance of Elle Fanning, not
among Sally Potter’s best works (see The Tango Lesson [1997]
for the tops).
Leo (Javier Bardem) is suffering from a form of
frontal lobe dementia. He’s “absent”, outwardly inexpressive (his face muscles
are set in a glum blankness), and dissociated from most of the everyday reality
around him. Sometimes he parrots a word he hears, seemingly in a meaningful way,
in recognition or response; mostly, however, he just grunts “hmm” – his most frequent
line of dialogue. Nobody – not his daughter Molly (Fanning), ex-wife Rita
(Laura Linney) or paid carer Xenia (Branka Katić) – can really get through to him, or understand the
occasional words or gestures he produces.
To a casual eye, Leo might seem merely massively
depressed; he spends a lot of time in bed, as the bleak, opening image
impresses on us. Living on his own in New York – apparently through an act of wilful
choice that has somehow been upheld through the development of his dementia – Leo
inevitably finds the barrage of urban sights and sounds in this all-too-close
environment confusing and upsetting (Potter’s stylised treatment of such events
recalls previous “mentally disturbed guys in the big city” films by Lodge
Kerrigan or Lynne Ramsay). The thought or visual reminder of a long-ago dog can
make Leo cry uncontrollably – or even compel him to grab somebody else’s mutt
as an instant replacement.
To some of the various health professionals and random
citizens he encounters, Leo looks just recalcitrant, uncommunicative, “out of
it”, maybe drunk or in a drugged stupor. For Molly, trying to get him to a dentist
and then an optometrist via an unscheduled stop at the Emergency ward, this
adds up to a headlong, stressful gauntlet on par with Adam Sandler’s trajectory
in Uncut Gems (2019) – scenes where
DOP Robbie Ryan can do his best, anti-picturesque work. Leo’s evident
Mexicanness invites racist insults from strangers in stores and on the streets
(only an Indian cab driver, in one of the film’s better scenes, shows him any genuine
empathy). Molly keeps righteously pointing out that people talk about Leo in
the third person while he’s sitting right in front of them. She seems to be the
only person who can build even a fraction of ongoing, functional rapport with
Leo – although he can just as easily wander out the door (barefoot, no less) on
her, too, in his usual dissociative daze.
It’s a movie about how people attempt to cope with the
mental illness of those they love; and it’s also, on a woollier and less
grounded level, a fistful of metaphors concerning cultural displacement, non-assimilation,
casual intolerance and daily, grinding injustice. But it’s not a realist
portrait of any of that, finally; rather, it’s a projection into Leo’s inner
life (or, in an inescapable intertextual echo from Bardem’s star career, his Sea Inside). A hypothetical projection, naturally, since we
cannot genuinely “see into” the mental activity of a person with dementia.
Leo repeatedly goes to a couple of places in his head,
thanks to cinema. Back to Dolores (Salma Hayek) in Mexico; while he lolls
listlessly in bed, she determinedly sets out for a ritual ceremony that will,
in some way, reconnect her with their dead son. He rages, she pleads, they
argue in the car and out on the dusty road, finally embracing each other in
some spooky place of mourning. And Leo also flies in his mind to a sunny Greek
island, where he has gone to write a novel; there he becomes attracted to young,
blonde Anni (Milena Tscharntke) – not erotically (I think, although
Anni’s no-nonsense companion certainly suspects otherwise), but because she is
a stand-in for the now-adult daughter (i.e., Molly) he left behind in USA.
Partly led on by the associative cuts and transitions
that return us to the merry ‘60s era of Two
for the Road (1967) or Petulia (1968)
– the particular period of (ultimately ephemeral) stylistic liberation I eagerly
discuss in the “Ever-Tested Limit” chapter of Mysteries of Cinema – I took these exotic (and at times clichéd) parts
of the film as, more or less, flashbacks. Maybe with elements of “retouching”,
compensation, fantasy in and for Leo’s battered psyche (à la David Lynch, but with less Gothic). As I watched, I noticed –
and then shoved out of my cognition – certain discrepancies: it’s hard to
establish or arrange the chronology of Leo’s two major marital relationships
(to Dolores and to Rita), and it’s a bummer trying to square just what Leo achieved
(and how long it took him) on that pleasant isle.
But I was way off the track! The main clue or pointer
is right there even in the Wiki synopsis: “Leo is reliving parallel versions of
his life in his mind”. Oh god, it’s another mind-game movie! And also a
somewhat New Age one – an ethos that sometimes surfaces in Potter’s previous
films, such as Yes (2005), and in the quotation on De Sica
prefacing this review. But what precisely does this mean: parallel versions of
a life? It was only on cross-checking with Norwegian film critic Dag Sødtholt
that I came to realise Leo had never spent years combating Dolores in Mexico,
nor did he laze for very long in the Greek sun like Leonard Cohen.
Dolores was just a first love, a “childhood
sweetheart” as Rita explains at his hospital bedside; and the trip to Mexico
was a dream he abandoned almost immediately, coming straight back home (the
nature of “home” and belonging, however, constituting another many-sided theme
sprayed around here by Potter). Why, in reality, did Leo’s marriage to Rita
(and his family trio involving Molly) disintegrate? I’m not certain (beyond his
seemingly vain egotism), but we may have learned more about this in an entire
other “parallel life” section wholly expunged from the final cut: a gay love
story starring Chris Rock!
Take a look at Leo’s parallel lives; they are weird.
They have fantasy or wish-fulfilment premises: to have stayed with one’s first
love; to have struck out as a romantic writer. Yes, those Roads Not Taken! But
they are laid out – and Leo supposedly experiences them – more as protracted,
unfolding life-lessons. The laying-out or unfolding effect relates to an
insistent mythological motif: Leo’s quasi-Homeric journeys (the journey is
another prime New Age motif), whether by foot, car or boat. But how often can
this Homer make it home?
With Dolores, there is nothing but the difficulty of
facing death. And in Greece, the writer writes nothing: we see his pen poised
above a blank page (remember L. Cohen: “the rain falls down on last year’s man
…”); he points to his own deep-thinking brain where that writing is germinating
(every writer needs choice, subtitled screenshots from this movie for their
computer desktop); and he talks to Anni about his inability to complete his
book, to find an ending for it. Eventually, he will row out in vain to a disco cruise
ship where Anni parties, losing his mind or maybe even his life in the process.
So Leo lives out being unhappily married, and
achieving complete failure as a creative writer; he’s agonised and depressed in
one tale, unfulfilled and probably dead in the other. Wow, that’s the kind of
dissociative fantasy life I really crave! Leo’s imaginings are basically
projections of guilt and remorse – even for things he didn’t actually do in
reality. Yet the film portrays him on some manner of therapeutic, mental
journey of self-realisation and discovery; that culminates when he finally
utters his daughter’s name (Molly was, in fact, the project’s working title).
So the thematic “argument” of the script would seem to
be: if you regret your life now, just plunge into the alternative lives you
would have regretted far more! Which
is, frankly, the famous It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
logic of apologia. Now, Potter is no fan of the politically conservative status quo (as Frank Capra may have
been) and is clearly not trying to excuse all that it entails – but you can
see, all the same, where the New Age drift takes her, ultimately. “We are linked. In reality it is one for all
and all for one”. As Leo might well respond: hmm.
I’ve said above – without researching it on any
medical level – that we cannot see or know the inner, mental life of a person
afflicted with dementia. Movies, for their part (from Charly [1968] to Awakenings [1990],
even, in a blackly humorous vein, Shock
Corridor [1963]), are obsessed with stories of permanent or (more usually)
temporary “recovery” from dementia: moments or periods of lucidity,
“reawakenings”, where the dissociated person suddenly snaps back into normal
life and gets not only to relate his or her experience, but also to declare
various position-papers on the pinnacles of humanist love and understanding
they’ve miraculously arrived at. Yet how, in reality, could such an inner
journey be possible for someone with dementia?
It’s an almost grandiose form of wish-fulfilment – not
for the mentally sick, but precisely for the “well” among us, the carers (this
film’s real, if uncertain or unavowed, focus), who desperately want to believe
that the absent loved one is still, somehow or somewhere, present, still
themselves. Molly literally gets to say to her father in the final scene: “No
matter what, you will always be you”. But is that so?
The entire movie builds – despite all the realism of
its everyday, hurly-burly scenes – to Leo’s single, near-magical moment of
clarity. The very final grace note of The Roads Not Taken even seems to shift
the possibility of willed dissociation onto Molly as a magical gift: she can stay and she can go (that’s her dilemma of choice, like in the Clash
song), all at once! Well, maybe …
MORE Potter: Orlando © Adrian Martin 2 May 2020 |
