There’s a very specific brand of pretentious navel-gazing that comes out of a Hollywood screenwriter attempting to dramatize Hollywood itself. Something about turning the cameras on themselves brings out a toxic amount of self-loathing that would be welcome if it weren’t so congratulatory. Mojave is the second directorial effort from The Departed scribe William Monahan, and the entire affair absolutely reeks of the kind of shame that only comes from accumulating exorbitant sums of money to play make-believe for a living.
Garrett Hedlund, everyone’s favorite try-hard white leading male, stars as Thomas, a renegade filmmaker positioned as a more Hunter S. Thompson-loving James Franco. It’s kind of the perfect role for Hedlund. He’s able to extrapolate the scruffy solipsism of his roles in On the Road and Inside Llewyn Davis to even more cloying heights, but within a narrative built around his introspective “fauxlosphy” bullshit. Thomas, as many an affluent white dude has before him, grows bored with his current life and has to go “into the desert” to find himself. There, he crosses paths with the film’s true star, Oscar Isaac. Seriously, there’s never been a film with two actors that balance one another out quite the way Hedlund and Isaac do. Isaac plays Jack, a roguish drifter who may or not be the Devil. The two men have an altercation around a campfire—rife with self-reflexive dialogue about the nature of being—and then Thomas leaves Jack behind, doomed to be stalked for the rest of the picture.
It’s in the desert that Thomas accidentally makes a more grave transgression, one that Jack witnesses. Thomas used a production vehicle from his latest picture to make this self-destructive sojourn, so Jack is able to use the crashed truck to trace Thomas’ life back in Hollywood, where to the two men engage in a game of cat and mouse, propped up with terror and blackmail. Tonally, their relationship has the ‘90s thriller aesthetic of Wesley Snipes and Robert De Niro in The Fan, but thematically, there’s a deeper undercurrent that seeks to explore the true meaning of artistry and a lot of typical aspersions on the nature of class warfare. The film asks questions closer to the ones at the heart of Woody Allen’s Bullets over Broadway than any of the Hitchcock-by-way-of-Desert-Sessions trappings on display.
Thomas is a young, white, wunderkind estranged from his wife and child, engaged in an affair with an actress (Louise Bourgoin), and feeling every pound of his own intrinsic shittiness weighing down the greatness he’s achieved. He’s burdened with the luxury of free time to dwell on his place in the universe. Jack is about the same age, very intelligent and more than a little unhinged, but his bearded face and browner skin offer a sharp counterpoint to Thomas. His background is murkier and typified less by luck than tragedy. Jack truly believes if he was given a different start, he would be 10 times the artist Thomas is. Instead, he’s just a serial murderer with an axe to grind.
The biggest problem with Mojave is that, ultimately, it expects us to side with Thomas, who Hedlund fails to ascribe any measure of likability. He’s reprehensible in a way that isn’t even interesting. He provides the amount of depth you’d maybe be impressed by on a CW Network teen drama. Isaac, on the other hand, is reliably magnetic. He’s far more entertaining, which isn’t exactly his fault, but that charisma engenders a sympathy that is totally at odds with the conclusion to which the film builds. Along the way, there are two really fun performances from Mark Wahlberg and Walton Goggins, as Thomas’ producer and agent, respectively. They provide a dimension to Monahan’s Los Angeles that feels a little like late-period Cronenberg, with that curious mix of absurd humor and malice. But when it comes down to it, the picture belongs to Hedlund and Isaac.
This is a movie that could have really been something with just a little more polish. The film is already ruthlessly efficient, which is appreciated, but there could be even more intrigue if the first arc was reordered slightly. Were we to meet Thomas in the desert, a later sequence where he makes his way to town to be extracted back to his rich life would be more devastating. That we already know he’s a rich dude playing pretend Bear Grylls undercuts his introduction, much the way it works against his entire narrative arc. Similarly, the film’s remaining two-thirds is well-constructed, both for tension and stakes-raising, but the final statement that the climax brings completely shits the bed, throwing any chance at pulling these disparate strands together into something meaningful. Without an effective conclusion, Mojave remains a pathetically pretentious mess that limps to the finish line on the backs of its stars’ considerable chemistry.