Every once in awhile, a film comes down the pike that you just can't explain. "The Canyons" is one of those films. Aggressively bleak, ludicrously tawdry and patently terrible, "The Canyons" is a spectacular failure.
Already infamous for being the "comeback film" for its star, Lindsay Lohan, and its stunt casting of porn star James Deen, "The Canyons" is a dark, depressing film full of loathsome characters doing loathsome things.
The story doesn't really have a single protagonist, instead focusing on two couples: movie producer/trust-fund brat Christian (Deen), his girl, Tara (Lohan), Christian's assistant, Gina (Amanda Brooks), and Ryan (Nolan Gerard Funk), a vapid, pretty-boy aspiring actor.
Christian has just cast Ryan as the lead in his latest, a slasher pic, at Tara's insistence. Neither Christian nor Gina knows that Tara and Ryan have a past, not to mention their present. Of course, Christian is having his own flings, not to mention the kinky sessions in his apartment with Tara and random men and women they meet online.
And such is the film: There's a sex scene, characters speak about nothing of importance, and another sex scene. Wash, repeat.
There are issues of trust and relationships, but none of the arcs goes anywhere. Christian claims to trust Tara but quickly grows suspicious. Meanwhile, he's sleeping around and starts using his movie to antagonize Ryan, of whom he grows increasingly suspicious and jealous.
The acting is uniformly terrible. Lohan delivers her lines like she's reading them off her hand, which is perpetually holding a champagne glass, and Deen, as bad as he is, fits as the film's ranking douchebag. Funk is equally bad.
Director Paul Schrader and writer Bret Easton Ellis (on whose novel the film is based) are trying to make a point about the black hole of pointlessness that Hollywood has become. It's a salient point, to be sure, but the message is delivered with such malaise and listlessness that it's difficult to muster the attention to care.
Both have done excellent work in the past; Schrader, of course, is the screenwriter of some of the great films of the last half-century, including "Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull," "American Gigolo" and "The Last Temptation of Christ"; his 2002 film, "Auto Focus," was a superbly interesting piece of filmmaking (that also was bleak and depressing and shares some themes with "Canyons"), and 1979's "Hardcore" is an oft-overlooked classic.
Ellis' books "The Rules of Attraction" and "American Psycho" were made into showy, well-received films that were engaging, interesting and memorable, if not great films in their own right.
There is copious nudity from Lohan, Deen and others, and at least four sex scenes. But there is no eroticism to be had; you get the distinct impression that the characters themselves aren't enjoying the sex act, but it is something they're forced to do. This is by design, of course — Ellis' statement of everyone in Hollywood screwing each other but being too self-absorbed and insecure to at least enjoy it.
In terms of story and acting, "The Canyons" is strikingly similar to Tommy Wiseau's cult favorite "The Room," which features similarly bad acting, simplistic story and hackneyed plot developments. But "Canyons" is too self-serious to maintain any kind of watchability, whereas "The Room" is too over-the-top silly to lose its audience.
But "Canyons" loathes everything: its characters, the filmmakers who made the film and even the audience, making any kind of poignant, entertaining or interesting viewing experience virtually impossible.
Terrible on every level, "The Canyons" is likely to finish high atop my worst of the year list in 2013.