This seems a little unfair. I have seen many worse films than Lost River, most of them Hollywood blockbusters. True, the film's not entirely successful: in terms of plot it's fairly scantily clad (but then again, so was Drive) and seems to pass like a hazy, very pretty dream (but I think this is kind of the point). Yes, it is style of substance, but when it looks as good as this, you don't particularly care. The whole time we're immersed in the titular decaying town, from the wasteland which nature is slowly reclaiming to streets with houses in various states of decay. Then there are the many shades of purple (any significance?) which bathe Rat's (Saoirse Ronan) bedroom and the horror porn nightclub run by the oily Dave (Ben Mendlesohn). There are plenty of memorable sequences: Christina Hendricks taking her face off, Rat's grandmother perpetually watching her wedding video and an episode involving Matt Smith, a rat and a pair of scissors. When Billy (Hendricks) is trapped inside a menacing perspex sarcophagus we can feel her claustrophobia, and there's palpable tension when a very un-Doctorish Smith offers Rat a ride in his Bully-mobile (unfortunately, it's never actually referred to as such).
Although it's sometimes difficult to decipher, there is some form of content at the back of the neon gorgeousness. The premise is that Billy and Bones (Iain de Caestecker) live in a stagnated town that's suffered massively from the damning of a river, some would say in a similar state of urban decay to my native Stoke. Billy, a little hard up, unwisely takes up her creepy bank manager's offer of a job, whilst Bones gets into trouble with Bully (Smith) for pillaging copper, and attracts romantic attention from Rat. So far so weird. The central theme is the sometimes unsayable ties which link us to our hometown. Is home a family, or a place? I imagine most of us would opt for the former, but if Billy and Bones left their home to be demolished, it's easy to see how that would feel like sacrificing a large chunk of the past. Yet the damning of the river is a handy metaphor for the unnatural halting of the process of maturing and letting go. Bones has never left his hometown, never been truly independent, and is therefore suitably juvenile. Bully, with his scissors and dubbing his turf
Bullytown, is no more than a horrifically overblown school-ground menace. In a scene which seems to have been cut, he was driven around in the Bully-mobile flexing his biceps whilst shouting 'look at my muscles!' through a loudspeaker. It's not so much that the town is dying, but it's trapped in a perpetual childhood. Bones still refuses to see his mother in anything but black and white, and hence is hugely judgemental of any whiff of a man on the scene. Billy, meanwhile, when forced to take her son to work, is chastised by the creepy Dave, who complains 'that's not very sexy, is it?'. She's lurched from the moral perfection that Bones seems to require from her at home, to a deeply disturbing voyeurism where showgirls pretend to hack each other to bits.
All this is very well and good, but none of these themes are particularly well developed by Gosling. There's so much happening that everything seems a bit slight. Bones only exchanges a few hostile words with his mother, so we're left to guess the rest ourselves. Similarly, Matt Smith is only allowed the briefest of screen time, much of which he spends screaming intimidatingly in the manner of a pantomime villain, and is only granted one (rather brilliant) scene to flesh out his character a bit. Ronan is brilliant is usual, with a character that suits her much better than the irritating American in How I Live Now, but her dialogue either simply advances the plot or is comically clunky (her attempts at flirting with Bones are far from subtle, but initially still seem to go over his head), so she's left to stay brilliant via those sad and expressive eyes of hers. De Caestecker, who does at least have the virtue of being on screen for much of the film, is hopelessly bland compared to the supporting cast, and only makes for a serviceable protagonist.
But ho hum. I think what really matters about Lost River is not the content, but the feeling. It's the oddest kind of fairytale, lit in bright neon and accompanied by a brilliant soundtrack of retro electronica. Like a fairytale, it is slight: the characters often aren't far away from archetypes and despite three or four main plot strands, not a lot ever seems to happen. But there is something haunting about it. Maybe it's just the little details; the walls of the dilapidated school still declaring that 'every child matters'; the kitschy television programmes Bones and Rat watch or that wedding video on repeat forever. There's a little bit of the past that we cling to, despite realising that we really should let go and it probably wasn't worth that much in the first place, and I think that's what Gosling was getting at when he wrote the screenplay to this odd film. Whilst acknowledging that it did disappoint my great expectations just a little, I'm glad I chose to satisfy my curiosity despite the warnings of the critics. It may not be the best film in the world, and Gosling has little chance of ever directing again after this colossal flop (most cinemas are refusing to show it, I had to watch it on Sky). But I'm glad it exists. The world is better for it.
