Mojave (dir. William Monahan, 2015)
Inside Llewyn Davis is one of my favorite films of the last decade, so you can imagine how excited I was to learn that Oscar Isaac and Garrett Hedlund were in another film together. Sure, it was something that I had never heard of before and only found on Netflix after the awful algorithm suggested it to me after watching some dreck, but how bad could it be? Well, let’s look at some dialogue:
Jack (Isaac): Oh, man, nothing’s that easy, brother. No, no, nothing’s that easy. That’s Ahab’s leg, brother. That’s some story conference shit. Mars a fine work of ambiguity. You know, I’d believe Ahab if he had two legs and wanted the whale for reasons he couldn’t explain, but the whole… missing leg as motivation, man, that’s… it’s like the executive’s wife thought of that shit.
Tom (Hedlund): You know something about that?
Jack: No. I’m into motiveless malignty. I’m a Shakespeare man.
That’s certainly something. It isn’t good, but it’s something.
Tom is a disillusioned screenwriter who we know is deep because he references Byron and Rimbaud. He wanders into the desert one day out of some vague, quasi-suicidal impulse when he encounters a talkative drifter who calls himself Jack. Their meeting ends in violence and the accidental shooting of a police officer. Tom makes his way back to Los Angeles, but Jack tracks him down. At this point, the film turns into a hybrid of a pretentious literary thriller and Hollywood satire, and yes, that is as unpleasant and inept as you can imagine.
Clearly William Monahan intended the film to be funny. The characters played by Walton Goggins and Mark Wahlberg make that clear enough. I laughed when the detective played by Sterling K. Brown, who can apparently salvage anything he is in, corrects his partner by saying ‘sex worker’ instead of ‘prostitute.’ The question, then, is whether Mojave is meant to be a parody of these kinds of films–the post-Tarantino, poison-pen-letter-to-Hollywood story–and I don’t think it is. I suspect that Monahan was mostly sincere about his intentions, and I find that baffling.
The best that I can say about the film is that I’m happy that Oscar Isaac achieved his character’s dream of playing Hamlet in that Off-Broadway production where he ruined a pan of lasagna night after night.
oliveresque 