Mitchell Haven’s (Tygh Runyan) movie is based on a real event: the disappearance of a North Carolina couple, Velma Duran and Rafe Taschen, who vanished (a possible double suicide) along with $100 million. The director of that movie is Mitchell Haven (those shared initials are no coincidence) and its producer is Marissa Haven (Hellman’s daughter, Melissa Hellman, produced Road to Nowhere), and it is sometimes unclear whether we’re watching the movie within the movie or Hellman’s actual story. Laurel emerges, the credits roll, and we are in the labyrinth: the credits are not for Hellman’s movie, but for the movie that Hellman’s movie is about. A man emerges and, after a pause, there’s a gunshot. Outside her window, the night is punctured by the headlights of an arriving car. The composition has a complexity that feels new for Hellman-and the eye, encouraged to wander, finds only barriers.įrom there, Hellman cuts to Laurel’s hair waving in the blast of the dryer. The action is slow, suggesting real time, as Laurel paints and then dries her nails. The DVD image on the laptop grows larger until it fills the screen, plunging the viewer in. In Road to Nowhere, however, the scenes are full of inner life.Īfter a few brief frames in which a woman (later revealed to be the blogger who provided the story idea for the movie-within-the-movie) puts a DVD of Road to Nowhere into a laptop and begins playing it, we see a long take of Laurel (the alluring Shannyn Sossamon), who will play the lead in the movie, sitting on a bed. The road in Two-Lane Blacktop is treated as an irreducible given, for the characters and for the viewer. Hellman’s rejection of any explanation for the state of things is part of what makes his work so strong. One is stuck in a present in which nothing has any visible causes. The imagery of Hellman’s earlier films has a hard-edged, almost flat toughness. As Hellman himself, now 79, told an interviewer, “In a lot of ways I feel like Road to Nowhere is my first movie-everything else before it was a rehearsal.” Now, in his first feature in 21 years (lack of financing for past projects is reportedly to blame), Hellman has made his finest work, a hall-of-mirrors masterpiece about moviemaking in which the diversions are more complex, and therefore more enticing. The nihilism of American car culture has never been more deeply explored nothing seems to matter much to anyone, and there is neither tension nor joy in the races-the last of which famously ends with the movie projector seemingly breaking down and burning the film. The trip, interrupted by occasional car-races-for-money, eventually becomes a long-haul race to D.C. The blacktop in question is truly a “road to nowhere,” traveled by two young men (played by singer James Taylor and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson) in an old souped-up Chevy. Hellman, a low-budget director who never had a big box-office hit, first came to critical attention with his two mid-1960s “existential westerns,” Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting (both starring Jack Nicholson), as well as with his best-known film, the road movie and cult classic Two-Lane Blacktop (1971). Road to Nowhere isn’t just the title of Monte Hellman’s latest film it’s also the plot synopsis for all his best work. Best of Chicago 2022: Music & Nightlife.Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & Recreation.
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