The Roads Not Taken, review: welcome to Sally Potter’s hall of shame
Dir: Sally Potter. Cast: Javier Bardem, Elle Fanning, Salma Hayek, Laura Linney. 15 cert, 85 min
The Roads Not Taken is a gruelling, fragmentary, and certainly fun-free new psychodrama – it feels so divorced from anything we’d like its director Sally Potter (The Gold Diggers, Orlando) to be doing that it’s as if the body snatchers have landed. We spend the film crawling around in the headspace of a dying writer called Leo (Javier Bardem), who’s afflicted by symptoms of frontal lobe dementia, these taking the cinematic form of a dreamy peppering of sun-kissed holiday flashbacks.
His relationship with his daughter Molly (Elle Fanning) – the only person in his life to stick by him through thick and thin – dictates what wisp of a narrative the present-day sections have: she begins the film rescuing her catatonic father (whom she affectedly calls “papa”) from bed in a grimy New York flat, and taking him downtown to the dentist.
He can barely speak or respond to instructions, isn’t continent, and after tumbling out of a cab is whisked to hospital, where his ex-wife (Laura Linney, helpless) pays a brief, accusatory and badly written visit. The next stop is an ill-fated trip to Costco to buy Leo some new trousers, but his state of bewilderment is so extreme that he drifts out of Molly’s sight. Before we know it, he’s caught carrying off a stranger’s terrier in the belief that this must be his beloved pet Nestor, who is long dead. Molly then ushers him to an uneventful appointment with an ophthalmologist, and that’s about it.
Leo, in case this isn’t obvious, is falling apart, and Potter tries harnessing all of Bardem’s considerable technical expertise to make the character’s (barely specified) condition add up to something. Whether it’s her unsparing editing choices messing his performance up, or the airy vagueness of the script giving him no chance in the first place, he’s adrift and unintentionally ridiculous in shot after shot: this is hall-of-shame territory for a great actor palpably struggling to make any sense of a wretched role.
Matters do not improve when we cut free-associatively to what may or may not be episodes from Leo’s past, often involving two pretty young female tourists he aims to impress on a Greek island. “What kind of endings do you prefer?”, he asks these strangers, à propos of nothing, before revealing for the first time that he’s a writer, and that one of them is the image of his darling daughter. He follows them unbidden up a hill with more queries in this vein. Meanwhile, a handful of scenes in Mexico, opposite a woebegone Salma Hayek as his first great love, come and go.
The film is close to parody – not of anything Potter’s ever done, but of male artists and their obsessive end-of-life regrets. If you’d told me it was a shelved adaptation of late Philip Roth done by Alejandro González Iñárritu in Birdman (or Biutiful) mode, I’d have believed it in a shot.
The Roads Not Taken is in cinemas now
