Candy Molehill

Candy Mountain

Written by Rudy Wurlitzer

Directed by Robert Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer

At the USA Nickelodeon

WATCHING Candy Mountain is something akin to staying up all night listening to a disgruntled teenager; the experience is lengthy, exhausting and ultimately unproductive.

The director, Robert Frank, has said that he intended this film to be a "road movie," and in that he has certainly succeeded. The plot of Candy Mountain unrolls something like The Wizard of Oz on high-octane fuel. It all hinges on a frankly ludicrous rock-'n'-roll quest.

Our hero, Julius (Kevin J. O'Connor) is a stuporous New York City punk in high-top Keds and a greasy leather jacket, who has just lost his job and wants to become a musician. Somehow he convinces a bandleader, Keith Burns (Buster Poindexter, a.k.a. David Johansen) to give him his "big break" if he can locate a reclusive acoustic guitar maker, Elmore Silk (Harris Yulin), who has mysteriously disappeared from the New York music scene.

All this happens in about the first 10 minutes, and then it's off on the yellow brick road, in this case the New York Thruway, to search for Elmore. It's here that, according to the press kit, "the realities and illusions of the open road confront Julius with his own fears, with who he is, as opposed to who he thinks he is, with losing himself in order to find himself..." and so on and so forth. But believe me, it isn't nearly that exciting.

First of all, is the disappearance of an acoustic guitar maker really the best premise for a rock-'n'-roll quest film? Buster Poindexter's band, which gets to play for about 15 seconds, uses an electric guitarist anyway, and you can hardly hear him under all the brass. In addition, Julius himself, who gets a chance at one point to croon a bit of a folk song, proves himself an impossibly bad musician, so a "big break" hardly seems in order for him even if he could find Elmore Silk.

Worst of all, Julius' "voyage of discovery" is tortuously boring. Where Dorothy meets sympathetic souls on her way to Oz and shares adventures with them, Julius just keeps bumping into rock stars who stay on screen long enough to do quick, generally wooden cameos. Thus Julius meets Tom Waits, who plays Elmore's sleazy brother, for about five minutes, or long enough to get ripped off by him. Then Julius meets Dr. John, who plays Elmore's sleazy brother-in-law, for another five minutes and is again ripped off. Leon Redbone gets about six minutes as a silent Canadian deputy who--guess what?--rips Julius off. Poor Joe Strummer doesn't even get the opportunity; he plays a security guard with no particular significance plot-wise and is on screen for maybe three minutes.

And just in case you were planning to wait it out and see what the great Elmore Silk is really like, don't bother; he's a bearded bald guy who lives in Nova Scotia, looks like a truck driver, and like almost everyone else, rips Julius off.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that something is wrong here. Come on, who casts Buster Poindexter, Tom Waits, Leon Redbone, Dr. John and Joe Strummer in a movie and then doesn't let them play? (I mean, besides Alex Cox, who did the same thing in the even more pernicious Straight to Hell).

Strangest of all, perhaps, as the fact that this film wasn't even shot well. Frank is known as a legendary still photographer, with such classic works as "The Americans" behind him, and his free handed, experimental film techniques have been much celebrated and imitated. In Candy Mountain, however, his camera work only manages to confirm all your worst fears about a documentary director making a feature film; i.e. what seems immediate and convincing in cinema verite appears only sloppy and amateurish when scripted. It's incredible that some of this footage got used at all: too much rapid panning, clumsy cuts, intrusively boring camera angles, irrelevant establishing shots, even microphone noise on some of the soundtrack. Experimental, hell; this is just sloppy production.

Frank has admitted that Candy Mountain contains a lot of autobiographical material based on his experiences in New York and later as a near-recluse in Canada. I can't help suspecting that he sees himself in the character of Elmore Silk, escaping from a cynical entertainment world--which the Rolling Stones on tour epitomized--and striving to save his artistic integrity. Even a movie about disillusionment, however, has to draw its viewers in with something worth their attention. Candy Mountain doesn't. Frank clearly can, and has, done better.