These days, American films which attract 'serious' critical attention tend to appear in a blaze of publicity, and are usually forgotten by the time the next self-declared 'masterpiece' is ready for consumption. Monte Hellman's ROAD TO NOWHERE took a different approach, quietly opening in a handful of US cinemas before being released on DVD. Yet in years to come, this will surely be regarded as the defining film of its era. Indeed, it may well be the LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD of our generation: an endlessly fascinating puzzle which resists easy comprehension, and whose solution, like Gatsby's green light, constantly "recedes before us," leaving us with the hope that "tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning—." For this is a cinematic masterpiece in a peculiarly American tradition: one that refuses to sit down and behave, but instead wanders restlessly in several directions, accruing, like Melville's White Whale, a range of possible meanings without ever definitively committing itself to any of them. This is not a film to be watched once and dismissed, but rather a work of art to live with, one that - like VERTIGO and CITIZEN KANE - should be returned to periodically in the hope not of finding the key to the Borgesian labyrinth, but rather of better comprehending the labyrinth's nature.
Review of Road to Nowhere
