Under the Silver Lake (2019)

rating: ****

the story: A struggling LA resident finds himself deep in the midst of a wild conspiracy.

review: Essentially Once Upon a Time in Hollywood without Tarantino, a sort of love letter to Hollywood culture.  Under the Silver Lake is a one man spotlight for Andrew Garfield, letting him drift through the film and its kaleidoscope of craziness, in the process giving director David Robert Mitchell his highest profile movie yet.

Garfield has been a highlight in the movies for about a decade at this point, but two Spider-Man movies that weren't especially well received meant his profile began to suffer.  Silver Lake is a reminder of his appeal.  The movie, and the music around him, is a vision of Hollywood that only Hollywood itself could conjure, full of beautiful women and logic that makes little or no sense, except that it somehow does, and explains everything from pop music to the fates of the obscenely rich.

What's most impressive about the movie is that it's sort of classic noir, too.  Not noir in the way you usually think, whether because you still think of noir for its black and white roots (such as recent examples like The Man Who Wasn't There and The Good German, wrongly dismissed as a Casablanca knockoff because...it features Nazis, and a romance), or general style (as in Brick, which I've never been able to entirely enjoy despite appreciating its overall achievement), but approach, which again, is why we follow Garfield around, and listen to the particular noir-style musical score accompanying him.

The result is a mood piece.  Garfield is not a detective, but sort of stumbles into becoming one, as he attempts to solve a bizarre conspiracy theory.  One of the running plot points is that he's going to be evicted because he's failed to make rent, but he never seems especially concerned about it.  He exists in a wonderland where the only real concerns are ephemeral, and he doesn't mind the eventual solution to his real problem, even if he seems to have had many better ones available. 

All of it really means that whatever Mitchell does next, I'll be paying attention.