Photo courtesy of ThinkFilm

Down in the Valley	Image courtesy of ThinkFilm
…the San Fernando Valley, that is. Come one, you know the place: Swimming pools, movie stars, Jethro…. In other words, it’s your usual assortment of dysfunctional Hollywood wierdos. Or, at least the same type of weirdos still exist within David Jacobson’s version of the Valley where modern day cowboys fit into the schematics of southern California about as well as the Amish fit in with the hookers down on Sunset Boulevard. In his latest film, Down in the Valley, Jacobson’s trip down memory lane starts with teenager Tobe (Evan Rachel Wood) picking up an eccentric cowboy named Harlan (Edward Norton) at a gas station who just happens to be twice her age. Thanks to Harlan’s romantic belief in the possibility of “a chance encounter becoming a life-altering relationship,” he quits his job in order to spend the day at the beach with Tobe and her friends; and, the couple ends up dating in spite of their illegal age difference. So, what is this nonconformist cowboy’s idea of a first date? Since Harlan doesn’t own a car because he thinks “it will make you lazy,” he steals a horse and takes Tobe on a romantic horseback ride through the mountains. As soon as Tobe’s dad, Wade (David Morse), finds out about the lovebirds’ equestrian joyride, he forbids Tobe to see Harlan, which doesn’t sit too well with the “de-ranged” urban cowboy, of course. Things really start getting interesting when a bad Travis Bickle mirror impersonation and some breaking and entering, start clueing us in to the danger of Harlan’s delusional reality. Yet, like any misguided, out-of-place, wannabe cowboy, Harlan returns to his weakness, Tobe, and asks her to run away with him. I won’t ruin the ending; but, let’s just say things take a suddenly violent left turn into a campy posse chase through the mountains and ends with a shootout on a movie set.
Photo courtesy of ThinkFilm			Obviously, Jacobson’s year-long stay in France during the writing of Valley’s script ended up being one of the most influential factors in creating the overall nostalgic tone of the film. You know, it never ceases to amaze me how the French find a way to romanticize everything – even memories of the San Fernando Valley.
Conveying Jacobson’s wistful, romantic images of the now seedy Valley onto the big screen could have been quite a challenge for his director of photography, Enrique Chediak. Yet, somehow his anamorphic widescreen lenses effectively find a way to capture the vast and empty portions of the San Fernando Valley. At times, it’s almost ironic how these rare spots of desert wasteland Chediak finds lurking behind the overwhelming shadows of the 409 combined with a lazy guitar score turn the Valley itself into yet another nostalgic character reminiscent of the Old West. Where the film starts to unravel is during the second act where the story is so underdeveloped it fails to connect the dots between Valley’s mesmerizing first act and the shocking finality of its third. Because Jacobson never explains the animosity Tobe and Lonnie have for Wade or the reasons behind Harlan’s psychotic metamorphosis, the sluggish middle of Valley ends up being little more than a question mark factory. Apparently, Norton, who assisted Jacobson with some of the re-writes, didn’t help him very much with character development and left some gaping holes in the vague narrative backgrounds of this misplaced Western. Yet, once you wade through the murky second act, Jacobson almost recovers from falling off of his “writing” horse by placing an old-fashioned shootout within a visually whitened, skeletal, suburban neighborhood still under construction. Ironically, what keeps him from recreating just another stereotypical Western ending is how he intricately weaves past and present along with fantasy and reality by having the shootout take place on a “fake” movie set full of characters dressed in costumes from “My Darling Clementine” to give a surreal twist to the nostalgia factor. Overall, Down in the Valley doesn’t quite live up to its potential. It starts and ends well, but the middle drags. It is beautifully shot in anamorphic widescreen, but it doesn’t show any depth to the characters. Its central love story is never addressed as an illicit love affair, even though it is based on an illegal age difference.
When Tobe says to Lonnie at the end of the film, “Don’t say anything. Don’t think about it,” you have to ask yourself what it is that we’re not supposed to think about. Valley’s strengths? Its weaknesses? Or how someone was finally able to romanticize the San Fernando Valley in a modern day Western? © Kelly Bartley 2006		Photo courtesy of ThinkFilm