SEARCHING FOR ANSWERS? Truth? Significance? For one damn clue about the whole miserable, meaningless mess?
Search elsewhere.
The United States of Leland's point is pointlessness, and the point is well taken.
It's understandable why many critics dismiss Leland as a soul-sapping exercise in metaphysical navel-gazing over the uselessness of our lives.
Overdose of barbituates, anyone? Cyanide chaser?
Self-awareness—the ability to truly know yourself, therefore question your actions, sometimes to the edge of emotional paralysis—is a burden. Social workers, professors and the clergy tell us it's a gift. It ain't. But cosmic awareness—the willingness not only to probe the meaning of all existence, but conclude that there may not be any, that sadness is the inevitable endgame, that everything eventually ends in shit, right down to our postmortem flesh decaying into worm snacks—well, that's a friggin' curse.
And it takes a pair of stones to stare directly into such despair and not cave to the default human impulse to take the universe's goodwill on faith.
It may not be as dire as all that, but God bless the child unafraid to gaze into the philosophical abyss without flinching. Leland doesn't flinch.
Imagine Sartre, Nietzsche and Socrates taking in a Leland matinee, snacking on a jumbo tub of existential angst and Diet Pepsis.
Vying to become the Capt. Kierkegaard of contemplative cinema, writer-director Matthew Hoge underscores Leland with a mournful alt-rock soundtrack that could have been Kurt Cobain's funeral repertoire. But it's his lead performer who mesmerizes with melancholy. Frighteningly focused actor Ryan Gosling (ShoWest's Male Star of Tomorrow) gives a riveting, nearly otherworldly performance as Leland P. Fitzgerald, an exceedingly mild, ordinary appearing youth who shockingly murders his girlfriend's kid brother, a retarded child.
Though violence jump-starts the story, Hoge establishes an elegiac tone that rarely wavers. His opening shot unspools like a visual poem to the peaceful balm of nature, concluding in the incidental, and all the more startling, discovery of the bloody body and bloodied murderer.
Remanded to juvenile hall awaiting trial, Leland's unsettling impassivity about what he's done (a fellow juvie inmate nicknames him “Devil Boy”), his eerie ruefulness, and musings on humanity's emptiness and casual venality fascinate prison teacher Pearl (Don Cheadle). A wannabe author, Pearl smells a book in this strangely recessive creature, a detached observer who killed a child for whom he bore no malice, and seemingly at random.
“I know what they want from me,” Leland scribbles in a class textbook Pearl gives him about The United States of America, on the cover of which he crosses out “America” and jots in “Leland” instead. “They want to know why.”
He doesn't know why. … Or so he says.
Pearl snubs prison rules to conduct intimate interviews with Leland. Is he, as knee-jerk outrage dictates, an amoral monster? Is he emotionally damaged goods? Or is he some sort of sad, tortured sage who recognizes an irredeemably hollow world for what it is? And does the “why” of his crime lurk therein?
“When I see a boy and a girl kissing, I see a sad old couple who cheat and can't look each other in the eye,” Leland muses about the fate of lovers. Of human behavior and the crutch of religious icons, he observes: “The devil makes more sense to me than God does. I can at least see why people want him around so there's someone to blame for all the bad they do.”
To connect the dots of a story about failing to connect the dots to happiness, Hoge deploys frequent flashbacks—we spend as much time in the past as the present, as Hoge fills in context in increments—augmented by Leland's pensive narration. Other filmmakers might clutter their story with both devices and fracture an audience's attention, but Hoge's floating pieces eventually settle neatly into one, like falling snowflakes coating a sidewalk.
Cheadle, an appealingly vulnerable and complex actor, is a fine foil for Leland, especially when the youth flummoxes him by pointing out Pearl's own offhand cruelty. And when Pearl seeks out Leland's distant father, renowned author and bastard Albert Fitzgerald (a cold, controlled Kevin Spacey), their exchange pierces the self-delusional nobility of every writer.
Pearl: “I want to write about your son, but I don't want to exploit him.”
Albert: “There's no distinction.”
As stunned and numbed family and friends, Spacey (a co-producer) and Lena Olin as Leland's guilt-ravaged mom, Jena Malone as his drug-dependent girlfriend, Michelle Williams as her shattered sister and Chris Klein as an overly attentive boyfriend provide sturdy support. They propel subplots that appear outwardly extraneous, but finally figure into Leland's fate.
Yes, Leland is joyless, introspective, obsessed with spiritual bankruptcy. Given the dazzle-our-senses-but-don't-disturb-our-synapses movie market, that flirts with critical wrath and box-office failure. But Leland dares to pose that Big Gulp question—what in the hell are we doing here?—never shrinking from a theory that would bring most of us court-ordered therapy.
Peggy Lee famously sang: “Is that all there is?”
Quite possibly, suggests this thoughtful, sensitive film.
So let's keep dancing.