Does the world need another male private eye movie? No. But obviously LA does, because LA without a hollow-cheeked private dick ricocheting from one floozy to another, collecting bullet holes and landing sucker punches in dark alleys before waking in a weird room with a corpse is not classic LA. Classic is as classic does. Surely one of the classiest excuses for sitting through this overdone hash is a full-length feature shot as a series of five 20-minute takes, in glorious 35mm color. You can see Too Late for its audacity, heterosexism, and self-reference at the grandiose Alamo Drafthouse, starting April 8.
The best thing about Too Late is the giddy sense of connection you get from watching characters appear, disappear, and suddenly reappear in new contexts scattered around that great Southern sprawl, Los Angeles. Five moving tableaux are set in a park, a mansion, a strip club, a drive-in, and a swanky hotel. That's the order they're shown in, not their chronological order. I'm not giving away anything the press notes don't divulge, and it won't hurt knowing the thing is a puzzle-maker's zigzag through space-time. It's a voyeur's dream to travel with the camera crew through this series of sordid milieux, whatever the order. If I hadn't taken notes, there's no way I would've been able to piece together the story.
The next best thing is that the cast isn't your usual puffed-up crowd of "stars." All the actors were unknown to me, which only shows how little I know. They've all cut their teeth on TV screens or stages. John Hawkes would not be considered a discovery. His face is the face we're stuck with for most of the 107-minute run-time, so I'm grateful it's a seedy, ravaged, ratty face with grizzled face-hair under thinning poetic locks. No one has ever come close to replacing Humphrey Bogart as the screen's master of cynical or sadistic or psychotic despair, but at least Hawkes looks convincingly underfed. Hawkes' Sampson isn't so much a character anyway as an icon, an homage to Raymond Chandler's ideal of a lone knight with an automobile tailing bad guys.
For all his logistical flair, first-time writer-director Dennis Hauck doesn't have much to say in the way of political, social, moral critique. This is no Chinatown, although he borrows a bit of mother/daughter confusion to achieve a fifth-act narrative surprise. Beyond surprise, there's no deeper payoff. The story as a story closes in on itself and won't trouble your sleep by awakening in you some greater existential dread. It's never even scary, and maybe it doesn't want to be, choosing intrigue over suspense. Fair enough. There's joy in its performance-based, cinema verite approach to this industry town that's never really left the sound-stage behind. Everybody hits their marks in Hauck's freewheeling, fast-panning camera's-eye view, leaving in its wake something like a soap opera with guns.
You will enjoy this movie if you enjoy movies, or long for LA, or admire bravura. You'll like it best if you're a straight white male. It's a bit late in social evolution for Too Late. There are no queers or eccentrics in it. No bums or gunsels or, god forbid, dykes. No Peter Lorre or Eve Arden. An impressive array of professional girl flesh includes a young tart (tits-out Vail Bloom) married to an old fart (magisterial Robert Forster) who in a fit of pique answers the doorbell naked below the waist, blurring the line between nice clean murder and dirty porn. I guess that's pure Mickey Spillane. Pulp. It's sad to see a young wannabe auteur scraping the bottom of the gun barrel when he could've aspired to a truly transgressive vision by breaking the dominant heteronormative imperative. That's what Noir is for.