Review: The destination is not the point in stark, drug-addled drama ‘Anchorage’
Experiencing the microbudgeted “Anchorage,” a drug-addled eulogy for the decaying American dream, is like dealing with a scrappy puppy that keeps nipping at your heels to get attention — no matter how irritating it can be, it ultimately proves difficult to dismiss.
With classic 1970s road movies charting the thematic course, the film follows a pair of brothers traveling through the seemingly endless California high desert in a beat-up Crown Vic with a trunk-load of opioid-stuffed teddy bears and a bible sitting on the dashboard.
Having kicked off their trek from Florida, Jacob (Scott Monahan) and John (Dakota Loesch) are on their way to Alaska, where they figure, based on supply and demand, they can unload their cargo of pills for close to a cool million.
Based on first impressions, looking at Jacob, with the blue hair on his head and the gold grill in his mouth, and the considerably less stable, opioid-addicted John, whose travel attire consists of saggy, red long underwear, one suspects they’re not going to pull off their get-rich-quick scheme, especially if they keep digging into their stash.
Writer-director Georgia Oakley’s inspired feature debut is a compassionate, tough portrait of a young lesbian PE teacher, played by Rosy McEwen, leading a double life in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.
Nevertheless they forge ahead, constantly bantering and bickering as they go, making rest stops in a series of dilapidated buildings at each desolate ghost town they pull into, seldom encountering anyone else along the way, with one, fateful exception.
Directed by Monahan over a tight, chronological five days of shooting, allowing precious little opportunity for retakes, the production relies on Loesch’s bare-bones script more as a road map, resulting in extensively improvised dialogue that becomes gratingly repetitive early on in the compact 80-minute excursion.
But it’s what exists outside their car window that leaves a more potent impression.
Director (and rock photographer) Anton Corbijn convincingly argues the importance of the British design team Hipgnosis, whose clients included Paul McCartney, Pink Floyd and Peter Gabriel.
As captured by cinematographer Erin Naifeh, the surreal succession of forgotten, crumbling structures in their path, from a former Air Force base to an abandoned housing development to a long-shuttered mining site, cast a surreal, “Twilight Zone”-tinged spell.
Relying on the dwindling natural light that symbolically darkens their way forward, the sparse visual landscape (with Death Valley, Hinkley, Lone Pine and Victorville among the production locations) serves as a metaphor for contemporary ills, the opioid epidemic in particular, ravaging society and tearing apart families.
Effectively accentuated by a score from Savannah Wheeler that’s laced with fittingly discordant, piercing strings, the soundtrack could have done without extra embellishments, like a folksy rendition of “America the Beautiful,” to get its point across.
Understandably feeling like they’re inextricably caught in an endless void from which there’s no way forward, Monahan’s Jacob bleakly peers out from the driver’s seat over the vast, empty purgatory lying in front of them, as a pine air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror swings back and forth like a taunting pendulum. While “Anchorage,” like its doomed passengers, might come up short in reaching the intended destination, the existential road to not getting there is nevertheless paved with its share of inescapably persuasive intentions.
‘Anchorage’
Not rated
Running Time: 1 hour, 20 minutes
Playing: Starts June 16 at Laemmle NoHo, North Hollywood
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