Movies into Film
The United States of Leland
Directed by Matthew Ryan Hoge
USA, 2004
Bette Davis Eyes? 
Jena Malone (Photo: Paramount Classics)
Ryan Gosling’s performance in the overlooked The Slaughter Rule (worth seeking on video) came as a minor revelation to me. This difficult, wintry saga of a perverse football coach and his “boys” makes demands on the viewer, and the rewards are there, too, despite a few dud scenes. Gosling’s newest foray into chancy material, The United States of Leland, in which he forsakes freshness for a kind of method acting fatalism, is a much lesser film. As the movie begins, Leland has stabbed to death an autistic child. The writer-director Matthew Ryan Hoge builds his story—the quest for a reason behind the killing—with a self-consciously tricky structure of Cuisinarted flashbacks, flash forwards, and ever present conundrums. It doesn’t work. Hoge wants to portray real lives intersecting tragically, yet with the logic of a thriller; he overloads his design with ludicrous twists so that by the midpoint the whole thing collapses.
The worst of these spasmodic anti-developments involves an awfully intense, unbelievably virtuous young man (Chris Klein) who acts as a resident guardian angel to the family of the murdered boy and who commits a crime just to get thrown into the same prison as Leland. Meanwhile, within those juvenile detention walls, Leland’s life and crime attract the attention of a sympathetic teacher (Don Cheadle). Pupil and instructor face off in petty battles of semantics that are not only dull, they are the longest sequences in the film. Families and the fine actors in them (Lena Olin, Ann Magnuson, Sherilyn Fenn) get short shrift, but Hoge reserves plenty of time for Gosling’s muttering and mumbling his way through such studied pseudo-profundities as “I kinda felt my heart breaking for her, but that was no good.” Or: “Another thing about tears—they can’t make someone love you again.”
The impassive Leland (surely the least exciting nihilist ever put on film) drones on and on about the sadness he sees in others, and how much more in tune he is with their misery than the poor chumps will ever be. This outrageously stupid film thus pretends to go for depth, but never really gets any further than playing dress-up with a doom and gloom soundtrack. (Several songs by The Pixies lurk therein.)
A major clue to this movie’s burgeoning status as a crock of shit lies in the scene where Leland’s girlfriend (Jena Malone) pleads with him to comfort her. Seeing no value in telling someone that everything will be OK (when clearly it won’t), he refuses. By the final scene, Leland has figured out how to say with conviction the words that she needed to hear: he says them prior to inserting a knife into a defenseless child, already a corpse as the camera tracks through the tall, green grass of a suburban neighborhood park in scene one. There, I just saved you from groaning in disbelief.
The movie also features Kevin Spacey (as Leland’s expatriate father, a novelist with the title America is Too Loud to his credit) in bite-sized pieces of pure camp. Spacey plays it as bitchy as Bette Davis, dismissing the warm-hearted Cheadle as “You vulturous little hack!” And what, as some of the metrosexuals I know would ask, is up with that? - NPT
March 2004
Movies into Film
© N.P. Thompson, 2004
npt [at] moviesintofilm [dot] com