Freeway

Um. What. It's difficult for many to be their own editor. It means telling yourself your work can be improved, and some can't handle that. When I see the phrase "written and directed by", I always tense up a little bit. While sometimes, a story is best told front to back by the person who wrote it, it can also become an outlet for the writer/director to indulge every idea they have, worthy or not. Freeway definitely falls into the latter category. It needed someone to go over this tangled mess of a script with a red pen and streamline it, and it needed someone else in the director's chair to shepherd this thing over the finish line with a sense of cohesion. It is a compelling mess, but it is definitely a self-indulgent mess. Ostensibly, it's a trashy, Jerry Springer-esque Little Red Riding Hood adaptation. Reese Witherspoon is Vanessa, daughter of a drug-addicted prostitute, living in a hotel. Her mom and stepdad get arrested, and she goes on the run to stay with her grandma and ends up crossing paths with a serial killer named Bob Wolverton (Kiefer Sutherland). Except there is SO MUCH MORE. Vanessa also has a boyfriend in a gang. And she ends up getting arrested for attacking Bob. And she is harassed in prison. And escapes prison. And and and and and ... "And" is the key word with this movie, because it is over-stuffed with ideas, and most of them are half-formulated. There's a pair of cops whose characters never seem to find any form; they jump between rude, helpful, inquisitive, and dismissive, and they believe and dismiss Vanessa's story as the script needs it. There's a boyfriend that gets fridged, and it doesn't really pay off, unless making a character that spends the entire movie angry at the world angrier counts as something. There's Bob's wife, and a colorful cast of characters in the prison, and the weirdly cheerful warden, and and and and ... see whay I mean? Then there's the Red Riding Hood parable is not only leaned on, but screamed at the top of its lungs for the first half hour; Vanessa is constantly wearing red, when she leaves for her grandma's, she packs her things in a basket (I wish I was kidding), and Bob's surname has a form of wolf in it. There's more subtlety in those [blank] Movie "parodies" from the 00's. But the RRH parable completely falls apart at a point and it settles into a sort of dollar store Tarantino/Oliver Stone hybrid ... until it needs to pick up the theming again at the very end. Like I said, it's a mess. But it's a compelling mess. Vanessa is chaos incarnate, and with how Reese throws herself into it at every moment, it's hard to look away. Bob is wonderfully slimy, sleazy, and creepy. The movie itself keeps hucking new ideas at the viewer, whether because it doesn't have a fully baked one to stick with, or it just has an abundance of hubris, I don't know, but there's perverse enjoyment to see what it'll do next. It has no style of its own, but it apes the styles it idolizes (think Natural Born Killers, True Romance, and Kalifornia) with such ineptitude and brazen obviousness, it's kind of charming. There's something to admire in a movie being unabashedly the sum of its parts, but those are spare parts from other movies, and it isn't afraid to let the duct tape and baling wire show. I'm not gonna say this is a "good" movie, because I think Freeway exists outside conventional concepts of "good" and "bad". It is unique. Wholly a product of its time and of its slavish adherence to inspirations it cannot hope to reach, yet elevated by that very failure to achieve its aspirations. It is watchable. It is bizarre. It is unsure of its own form, but it is (foolishly) sure it'll figure it out along the way. And I kinda like it for that brazen, unearned confidence.