Movie review: Too Late is too much

By Jay Stone

Dennis Hauck’s debut feature film, Too Late, is a neo-noir detective story set in Los Angeles and told in the manner, if not with the budget, of Quentin Tarantino. It’s an homage to the cinema of homages, and the overall effect is reminiscent of the 1996 Michael Keaton comedy Multiplicity, in which a man is duplicated several times, with each succeeding copy being less vibrant — and stupider — than the last.

Thus, we have a movie with oddball characters speaking in what is meant to be elevated dialogue (“That’s a refreshingly sanguine way of looking at the world”) or quoting other movies. Near the beginning, a couple of drug dealers in an L.A. park discuss the idea of having characters in films (particularly the 1991 comedy Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead) having access to videos of those very films, so that when the time came to explain the plot to the police, they could just show them the DVD. It’s the kind of meta notion that would have knocked them dead in, say, 1991.

Unfortunately, it wouldn’t work in Too Late, which is chopped up into six or seven long scenes and then shuffled into chronological disorder, a la Tarantino. Unlike beginning filmmakers who make movies on their cell phones, Hauck has shot his movie on 35mm film stock — the warmth of the process is evident from the first frame — and in unbroken takes, which must have been murderously difficult. In the first sequence, for instance, the drug dealers meet a young woman named Dorothy (Crystal Reed) who is waiting for a friend. The camera pans across the park and there, in a tree, we see a park ranger who has been listening to the whole conversation. It’s a perfect example of borrowing from a borrower: Tarantino has spoken for his love of the scene in Douglas Sirk’s 1954 melodrama Magnificent Obsession in which a similar pan reveals that the character played by Rock Hudson has been present on a beach where we did not see him at first.

The technical daring of the sequence is elevated — and made a little clunky, frankly — when the camera moves across the road for a telescopic view of Sampson (John Hawkes), a private detective who is then revealed in a split-screen close-up. Dorothy has phoned him, but by the time he drives to the park, she is gone. The rest of Too Late tells the story of who these people are. Rest assured you won’t believe a word of it.

Sampson visits several locales that will be familiar to fans of the genre — a fancy home in the Hollywood Hills, a strip club — where he arrests people, beats them up, attracts slinky women and so on. It’s what private eyes do, at least in the movies, or in movies about movies. Hawkes, with his prominent nose and hollow cheeks, is a galvanizing screen presence (he was the lean and frightening Teardrop in Winter’s Bone and the terrifying cult leader in Martha Marcy May Marlene) but here he is trapped in a screenplay that isn’t quite sure what to make of him. He’s a vulnerable tough guy who isn’t really either, although the movie does make room for a nice sequence in which Hawkes takes out a guitar and sings a love song in a bar at closing time. It’s part of a soundtrack of alt-country blues that includes several versions of the film’s theme, I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.

Too Late also finds a place for Robert Forster, the veteran actor whose career was rescued by Tarantino when he was cast in his 1997 film Jackie Brown. His sequence, in the home of a rich gangster, includes a long scene of an attractive woman (played by actress Vail Bloom) walking around naked from the waist down that evokes memories — if you can stand it — of Julianne Moore on Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993).

Near the end of Too Late there is a blackout and a voice says, “Please pardon the interruption while we change reels.” It’s where the director is actually changing reels, and it introduces the climactic sequence, set at a drive-in movie where one of the characters works in the projection room, although she dresses like a stripper, the chief occupation of women in this film. On the screen we can see bits of Alan Rudolph’s Choose Me, a movie that is also about nighthawks looking for love.

“I’ve seen this movie,” someone soon says about Too Late. “This is the last reel.” Indeed it is, and you can almost feel the self-satisfaction. This is an indulgent exercise from a young filmmaker who shows loads of promise, way too much style, and not enough script.

THE EX-PRESS, April 20, 2016

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