Bakersfield has never been a town that has been shown in a positive light when it comes to its presence in film and television. Annie Wilkes, the author obsessed psychopath from Stephen King’s “Misery” spoke highly on her life growing up in Bakersfield in the film. “Bakersfield P.D.”, a Fox aired sitcom, centered around a highly sophisticated FBI agent that has to come to grips with living the “simple” life that the many residents of Bakersfield apparently lived. Even children’s shows like “The Fairly Oddparents” called Bakersfield the city, “Where all black holes take you.” So obviously this town has been relegated to this undesirable light for quite some time. You would hope that something would come around to change that.
Well, when I heard that there was a new film coming out that was set to be a neo-noir set in Bakersfield, Calif. directed by Ethan Coen, one of the Coen Brothers, and starring Margaret Qualley as a hardboiled private investigator, Aubrey Plaza as a shady dealing cop, and Chris Evans as dubious and ill-intended church leader. I knew I was getting tickets as soon as I could. What I could have never anticipated however was how this film would go down as one of the worst film watching experiences that I have had in my years experiencing the medium.
To give the film some flowers before delving into the flaws, I do believe that the opening credits of this film were one of its highlights, especially if you are a resident of the film’s subject location. The opening credits are a point of view shot of someone driving around town and looking at the ample signage all over town, but with the normal lettering on the signs replaced with the information normally given in an opening credit sequence like the actors and director and such. It goes all across Bakersfield and shows many recognizable landmarks throughout town if you are someone familiar with the area. Though the fact still remains that this opening is only intriguing if you are me or the 420,000 residents of Bakersfield. For those outside of that I can see the impact of this opening lessened. The other thing that I feel this film ought to be commended for is its theme. Movies like “Chinatown” and “L.A. Confidential” have always awed me with bringing the common tropes of the black and white detective film to a modern film landscape. I always appreciate any filmmaker who attempts to capture this kind of story convention, and I have to admit that this film certainly does attempt. Even when I was downtrodden at what this film was, I still could not shake deep down the noir feel this movie went for and appreciated it.
Unfortunately, that is all of the praise that I can think of to give this film as I feel that everything else it tried to do fell flat in its approach. Let’s first start with this movie’s plot. To put it succinctly, this film does not know what it wants to do with its story and changes what it wants to do as you are watching it. The prime goal of our main character swaps from wanting to solve a murder at the beginning of the film, to investigating a possible kidnapping. The second half leaves this movie’s opening victim to really take a backseat for the rest of the runtime. When we do get to the grand reveal of the film, it leaves those watching confused to how they got to that point rather than mystified at being able to see how the pieces fit together. All the plot points in this film are quickly discarded just as abruptly as they were picked up to begin with. To give an example, there is a scene where the main character’s niece is working at a fast-food restaurant and there is a creepy looking old man who has been sitting at a table for hours and has just been staring at the girls who have been working at that time. Later on, we see the niece character leave her job at night and she approaches a bus stop where the old man is seen sitting there. He then approaches the girl and confesses how much he loves her then the movie cuts to black. You might think that this is a clue tied into this web of a mystery, but a short while later it is told to audiences that the creepy man is our main character’s neglectful father just trying to reconnect with his family after some time. He has nothing to do with the kidnappings or murders driving the plot, all it does is artificially muddy the plot for no reason at all.
Another problem with this film’s plot lies not only in the story beats that it goes through, but also the overall flow of the story. To put it bluntly, there is so much unnecessary nudity and sex in this movie that it really pulls you out of any investment that you could have in the story at hand. From what I can recall there are seven lengthy and drawn out nude scenes in this movie, that may I remind you does not even reach ninety minutes in length, that really have little to no reason to exist other than allowing audiences to see attractive people doing stuff on the screen just in case, I don’t know, if they got bored of the plot I guess?
Talking about the actors, that is where the final sin of this movie lies. The acting in this movie is all over the place which ends up creating this mix of tones that every actor is going for that just does not mix well with what everyone else brings to this function. To start, we have Margaret Qualley playing this true salt of the earth detective who delivers all of her lines in such a dry and blunt way that fits the noir theme. This acting clashes with Chris Evans’ portrayal of an exploitative head of a church who will try to con and charm his way into anything he wants. We’d then meet Aubrey Plaza who brings a cop character to life who just seems bored with everything and Charlie Day’s character who is a detective who only wants to sleep with our main character Honey and shares basically the same conversation with Honey at three separate points throughout the movie no matter what is currently going on at that point in the plot.
To a point, you almost have to be impressed that a movie like this could have even made it this far to disappoint audiences in the first place. It is a mystery that is left unsolved by both the characters in the film and the audience in the theatre alike. It’s glaring flaws span so wide across the film that there are so many more plot points that I had a personal problem with that I wish I could elaborate more with you all, but I would more or less just give an in depth synopsis of the film as a whole at that rate. But more than anything I hope that it is clear that I really wanted to like this movie. I thought this would be the diamond in the rough to give my hometown a voice in the conversation and really blow audiences away. Unfortunately for me and all viewers however, it seems like the search for that diamond must continue.
