What is the measure of a man? That’s the question writer Tony Gayton asks us to consider while watching 2002’s The Salton Sea, a quote he takes from Plutarch: “The measure of a man is the way he bears up under misfortune.” Gayton gives us a single man who’s had to take on a second identity, due to misfortune, and then asks which is the true man.
Director D.J. Caruso takes this script and creates a film that attempts to infuse it with the spirit of the Beat poets of the ’50s. Characters are addicted to methamphetamine, crank or gank, and the movie tries to ride along at the rhythm of a trip that’s gone on and on, extended by snorting another line, then by shooting up, over and over. But he misses out on what any movie requires: a dramatic rope that pulls the audience along, deeper and deeper, until the climactic release.
Val Kilmer plays the central character, born Thomas Van Allen but transformed into Danny Parker a year before the events of the movie when his beloved, adored wife is murdered in front of his eyes by a crew ripping off some meth dealers. A death for which Van Allen must hold himself responsible, since they’re only at this house because he’s lost driving them somewhere unspecified and needs directions, and which he survives only by virtue of having gone to take a piss and therefore not visible to the killers.
He becomes Parker in order to take revenge on the killers. He completely changes himself to be this new identity, covering his body with outrageous tattoos, ear piercings, heavy silver rings and jewelry, sweeping his hair up into a Mohawk, and, most importantly, becoming a tweeker, an addict, to infiltrate the world and create an opportunity to have that revenge.
Caruso opens the movie at the end, Kilmer sitting in a room on fire, playing Van Allen’s trumpet, in a voiceover that asks the audience to decide which persona is real. But sequence is handled poorly throughout with few but random jumps in time. Gaydon and Caruso also insert subplots and characters that only exist to bring this Beatnik existence to the screen since it has little relation to the main story, except to sometimes help Parker advance his agenda.
For all that I’ve focused on the negatives, I do think Salton Sea has its positives too and is a movie worth watching. Kilmer pulls off a difficult role, Vincent D’Onofrio is too much as another dealer named Pooh-Bear, Peter Sarsgaard has a small but well done part as Kilmer’s pal, and the ever-surprising B.D. Wong is, well, too hard to explain without spoiling the ending.
An intriguing, stylish movie
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