There are a few guys who are willing to hang out with him, one woman who is willing to have sex with him and a few more who might be, including a neighbor named Sarah with a fluffy little dog. There’s another neighbor who has a lot of birds and walks around topless on her porch, giving Sam an opportunity for a bit of voyeurism and the director, David Robert Mitchell, a chance to nod to “Rear Window.”
This is one of a great many nods, winks, rib-pokes, throat-clearings and other gestures in the direction of famous and less-famous movies, comic books, video games and songs. At one point, an issue of Spider-Man attaches itself to Sam’s hand by means of an errant wad of bubble gum, which is a funny coincidence — no coincidence at all, in other words — because Sam is played by Andrew Garfield, who used to be Spidey.
Most of the other allusions in this shaggy-dog tale of wild conspiracism and male petulance are not quite so blatantly meta. Sam and the director are both steeped in classic Hollywood, ’90s indie rock and various kinds of vintage memorabilia. The mood borrows from Hitchcock (whose grave figures in one scene), and also from Nicholas Ray, David Lynch and the Southern California noir tradition more generally. Also Thomas Pynchon, Robert Altman and Raymond Chandler. These aren’t esoteric references yielding themselves up to a connoisseur’s prying. They are part of the movie’s surface, and part of its point.
Sam believes that there are clues everywhere, if only he could figure out what they were clues to. He finds hidden messages in comics, song lyrics and antique cereal boxes, and he connects this information with strange happenings around him. Dogs are being killed in the Silver Lake neighborhood. A billionaire dies in a fiery crash. Sarah (Riley Keough) goes missing. Mix-and-match trios of young women — 21st-century variations on a meme of Betty Grable, Lauren Bacall and Marilyn Monroe in “How to Marry a Millionaire” — float through the city. Our man gives chase, gets sprayed by a skunk and eventually discovers ...
Don’t worry. It doesn’t turn out to matter much. The sweet smarts of Mitchell’s first movie, “The Myth of the American Sleepover” (treated to a bit of auto-allusion in “Silver Lake”) aren’t much in evidence here. Nor are the slippery psychosexual scares of “It Follows,” his breakthrough horror movie from 2015. The ambitions this time are grander, but also vaguer and duller.
Which isn’t to say that “Under the Silver Lake” is without some diverting qualities. The light, for one thing. Mitchell and his director of photography, Mike Gioulakis, savor the gorgeousness that has seduced so many previous filmmakers. And there are some moments of humor and surprise embedded in the overwrought intricacies and long slack stretches of the plot. But beyond the coy nostalgia and the timid satire is a feeling of bottomless exhaustion.
At a crypt party in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, in the company of a balloon girl (identified as Balloon Girl in the credits and played by Grace Van Patten), Sam jumps to his feet to dance to “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” by R.E.M. It’s a song partly about the latent, mysterious meanings embedded in pop ephemera (“I’d studied your cartoons, radio, music, TV, movies, magazines”), and as such a plausible anthem for Sam’s quest.
An equally apt, less pretentious choice might have been ZZ Top’s “Tush,” since that’s mostly what Sam is looking for and the camera is looking at. One of Sam’s prized possessions is an issue of Playboy from 1970 (it belonged to his dad), and “Under the Silver Lake” dwells in a hedged, half-guilty, self-conscious iteration of the magazine’s hedonist philosophy. There’s plenty of titillation and sexual opportunity, but no real lust, passion or liberatory energy.
Even Sam’s sense of belatedness feels secondhand. He’s a Gen-X sensibility trapped in a millennial body, with the tastes and obsessions to match. (Mitchell, it’s worth pointing out, is 44 years old). R.E.M. called irony “the shackles of youth,” and he drags it around like a Styrofoam ball and chain. Like other guys his age, Sam feels oppressed by an older generation of guys who lay claim to all the credit, the money, the art and the women, while he is left with a literal and spiritual pile of junk that may not mean what he hoped it would. The movie turns his resentment into a cosmic joke.
Look, I’ve been there. But I can’t say I sympathize, because there’s no basis for sympathy. “Under the Silver Lake” is less a cinematic folly than a category mistake, taking the sterility of its own imaginative conceits for a metaphysical condition. It isn’t a critique of aesthetic or romantic ennui, but an example of intellectual timidity. As a Los Angeles movie it lacks the rough, naturalistic edge of “La La Land,” and it thinks it’s so much cooler than “La La Land.”
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Additional Information:
‘Under the Silver Lake’
Rated R. If your date tries to explain that it’s actually more of a commentary on how women are treated in movies, spray him with Mace. Running time: 2 hours, 19 minutes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.