The Bad Batch, the latest from A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night director Ana Lily Amirpour, is one of those movies that’ll likely tax the patience of most moviegoers. It’s stubbornly, sometimes ridiculously, indulgent, posing far more questions than it cares to answer. It frequently slows to a languid crawl, during which a lot of nothing happens in the traditional sense. And it’s, well, just plain weird.
I’ll be honest: I’ve watched Amirpour’s sophomore effort twice now, and I’m still digesting a fair portion of it with varied results. But flaws, obscene indulgences, and all, there’s no denying this is the product of a distinctive artist who, through a combination of innate talent and good fortune, has been able to make exactly the work she wanted to make. And I want to see this ragged, frustrating, sometimes brilliant movie again.
Amirpour’s latest arthouse genre-movie mutation follows Arlen (Suki Waterhouse), a wisp of a girl thrown into a vast, fenced-off desert wasteland to fend for herself. Distinctive tribes of discarded misfits (Prisoners? Exiles?) have evolved in this arid place, including a band of musclebound cannibals led by an enigmatic Cuban exile known as Miami Man (Jason Momoa), whose members forcibly induct Arlen at the cost of a couple of limbs. Elsewhere, there’s a community called Comfort, where life is sort of a Burning Man festival for human detritus overseen by a potentate known as The Dream (Keanu Reeves), with a pornstar-mustached DJ (Diego Luna) spinning the tunes.
(photo courtesy Neon Distribution)
In case you haven’t gauged by the sorta-ridiculous synopsis, The Bad Batch lays fistfuls of referential breadcrumbs down to reward a certain strain of cineaste. The town of Comfort and Miami Man’s encampment both recall L.Q. Jones’s underrated 1975 dystopian jewel A Boy and His Dog, itself a sizable inspiration for the universe of Mad Max. The perpetually-heat-warped desert landscapes evoke Sergio Leone westerns. And Amirpour’s carefully-crafted, surreal, feverish visual sense (with accompanying indulgent downshifting of pace) betrays her spiritual kinship to cult auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky.
Admittedly, The Bad Batch’s mileage will vary vastly, even among rabid devotees of all of the above. The movie’s sometimes-meandering course, and its refusal to explain much of its alternate universe in literal terms, will frustrate a lot of people. It could be persuasively argued that, for all its visual brilliance and lovingly-rendered ambience, this heavily-bejeweled emperor of a movie isn’t wearing much structural or forward-moving plotline clothing.
But it’s often captivating. The first twenty minutes, and goodly shares of the rest, are truly great, visceral visual storytelling. Amirpour and cinematographer Lyle Vincent (returning to collaborate with Amirpour from Girl) create a distinctive nightmare vision of their own that often breaks free of the confines of its influences with nuanced, brutal, and darkly humorous detail. The movie also shares one of Girl’s best traits—an interesting, flawed, strong central female character for whom the words ‘Strong Female Character’ aren’t capitalized.
There’s no doubt that the actors joining Amirpour on this trip are likewise all-in. Reeves gives another great latter-day genre performance that’s equally weighty and winkingly wry. Waterhouse makes Arlen’s arc from victim to avenging angel to truth-seeker compulsively watchable without seeming like she’s trying. And Momoa’s quiet, glowering charisma and vein of paternal vulnerability lend his character the air of—don’t laugh, it’s true—a cannibalistic, beefcake version of Alan Ladd’s Shane (emphasis on beefcake: In a wonderful display of reverse objectification, Amirpour and Vincent explore Momoa’s perpetually shirtless physique with a cartographer’s thoroughness).
Shane with better pecs: Jason Momoa in ‘The Bad Batch’ (photo courtesy Neon Distribution)
Like any dystopian fable worth its dystopia, The Bad Batch is pretty much semaphore for the modern world. But if its thematic brushstrokes seem too heavy-handed, bear this in mind: I’m typing these words in a country whose spoiled-infant elected leader is utterly hell-bent on keeping America’s 99% impoverished, ignorant, and cripplingly dependent consumers (everyone in The Bad Batch is ultimately beholden to whatever material goods they can scrape up or exploit). Moreover, said toddler is poised to turn this entire country into exactly the arid wasteland that Amirpour’s movie depicts, all to gorge his own greed. Like it or not, this very untidy, imperfect, but always fascinating movie is, in its own pop-art way, a portrait of all of us—the decadent, profiteering 1% and the sand-caked, struggling 99% alike. That it’s not the first time this path’s been trod doesn’t make it any less resonant.
[The Bad Batch opens at The Grand Illusion tonight.]