Film
The San Fernando Valley in David Jacobson’s Down in the Valley looks like any other stretch of suburban sprawl, surrounded by freeways and cluttered with wires. When the two lovers at the heart of the film—shiftless wannabe cowboy Harlan, played by Edward Norton, and rebellious Valley girl Tobe, played by Evan Rachel Wood—share their first laconic flirtation under a gas-station overhang, Jacobson frames their give-and-take so that there’s always a Pizza Hut hanging over Harlan’s shoulder. Later in the film, Harlan stares out a window at the hills around Los Angeles, but the top of a light pole just slightly spoils the view. And in one of Down in the Valley’s signature moments, Jacobson holds for a beat on a black screen with the lonesome sound of a train in the distance, then cuts to a shot of that train, rolling through a crowded intersection.
In most movies, shots like those would be nice little touches; but in Down in the Valley they really are the movie. Aside from a semi-shocking twist in tone, Jacobson’s plot is straight and narrow, and holds to the unfortunate indie-film cliché that violence equals meaning. Harlan beguiles Tobe, charms her shy younger brother Lonnie (Rory Culkin) and unaccountably freaks out their stepfather Wade (David Morse), a juvenile corrections officer who claims to know Harlan’s “type.” But Jacobson is sketchy on what that “type” exactly is. Harlan’s clearly not who he pretends to be—an old ranch hand from South Dakota, now working part-time on the Valley horse farms—but the reasons why the character has chosen to romanticize a rural way of life aren’t as important to understanding Down in the Valley as the simple fact of that choice. Harlan’s basically just a symbol.
Luckily for Jacobson, he has one of this era’s most magnetic actors playing that symbol. Norton’s totally convincing when he drawls, “This ain’t a proper way to meet,” just after Harlan has sex with Tobe against her bedroom wall; he looks downright delighted when he rides a horse away from the concrete-lined Los Angeles River and ends up clomping onto a movie set, where an old Western is in production. And Jacobson frames his star beautifully, whether he’s setting a camera bobbing at head-level on the ocean, where Harlan and Tobe kiss in a limitless expanse of water, or he’s bemusedly watching Harlan try to cram a donut hole into a donut. Just when the movie seems hopelessly lost—which it does for much of its second hour—Jacobson finds its meaning again when he has Harlan take refuge in one of the half-built McMansions that uglify the landscape. The land is still the same as when our country was built, Jacobson suggests, but it’s been paved and lit with neon.
Down in the Valley too wants to be part of a vanishing past. Jacobson pays direct homage to Midnight Cowboy in a scene where Harlan and Tobe take ecstasy together, and to Taxi Driver in a scene where Harlan delivers a threatening monologue into his mirror. And the whole movie has the general feel of Five Easy Pieces, Chinatown and Sam Peckinpah at his ’70s dreamiest. Too bad that Jacobson didn’t trust his own emotional landscape, and that he dots it with the cinematic fast food of gunplay and overheated conflict. But in a lot of ways, like Harlan, Down in the Valley is an entity out of time. Which means, like Harlan, it’s got a screw loose.