Director: Monte Hellman
Stars: James Taylor (of “Fire and Rain”), Dennis Wilson (Beach Boy drummer), Warren Oates, Laurie Bird.
7/10
When Two-Lane Blacktop was released, Esquire proclaimed it Movie of the Year, featured a publicly still on the cover, and printed the screenplay inside. The hype was both boon and curse. I don’t think it did well in the theaters but over the years it became a cult movie. I saw it when it came out, liked it, but found it a little empty. It was haunting though and stuck with me. A second viewing many years later has not changed my view greatly, though I better appreciate the bleak depiction of people from the period.
Taylor and Wilson are the driver and mechanic, respectively, of a gray-primered 1955 Chevrolet built for drag racing: 454, dual quads on a hi-rise manifold, headers…. They travel across the country and make a living, of sorts, by challenging people to races – usually illegal ones – and betting a few hundred dollars. They do not show any exhilaration or joy from winning; they just count the cash and move on. We don’t learn anything about their lives, pasts, or motivations. We don’t even know their names. Each gives a fine performance, though neither is asked to show any range. Taylor conveys brooding if not menacing intensity.
The film is a rejoinder to Easy Rider in that it follows two people on their travel from west to east – a reversal of the movement in traditional westerns – and occasional interactions with rural, traditional people along Route 66. No horses, just powerful motor vehicles. Both have several scenes in New Mexico. Two-Lane Blacktop has excellent cinematography, including scenes in Santa Fe (The La Fonda inn) and near Tucumcari. Easy Rider uses Taos, I believe.
Two-Lane Blacktop points to a bleak, nihilistic stratum of youth culture of the period – one which I recall well but which gets glossed over in romantic depictions of the time. Continuing the Easy Rider comparison, they might be intended to elicit comparisons to Wyatt and Billy, or to Kerouac and Cassady from On the Road. These characters were far from idealistic, but they were looking for meaning – or at least Fonda’s character and Kerouac were. The pair in Two-Lane Blacktop think only of getting fast food, keeping the engine in top form, and finding a race in the next town – the winnings from which let them go on. One wonders what they might do if they lost. They might be intended to elicit thoughts of the two men from In Cold Blood.
Along the way, they encounter two characters. A young hippie hitchhiker (Laurie Bird) rides along for a while with little meaningful interaction with any of the characters, though there are awkward, intermittent efforts at personal contact and Taylor’s character develops an obsession for her. The other is a middle-aged man with a powerful new GTO (Warren Oates). Oates picks up hitchhikers and tells them various fables about his work and how he got his car. He has a wide assortment of music cassettes but has no particular interest in any of them. He is a different sort of nihilistic rootlessness – one escaping a past and floating from one fantasy to the other. The pair and he agree to race to Washington DC, with the winner getting the other’s car.
The race soon enough falls away and the three just meet each other occasionally, eat and chat, and even swap cars for a while. Two small scenes of a deadly crash and an elderly woman visiting a cemetery portend the road ahead. The ending suggests meaninglessness and burnout – perhaps where the filmmaker thought the 60s had brought us.
© 2010 Brian M Downing