Down in the Valley

Written and directed by the American director David Jacobsen - Criminal (1994) and Dahmer (2002) - Down in the Valley is another fine example of a deliberate, dark, independent film, superbly acted but faltering under the weight of its own off-beat ambitions.

We meet Tobe (Evan Rachel Wood), a bratty, attractive teenager who smokes, hates her dad, and looks moodily gorgeous. Tobe, short for October, and her brother live in a small house with her step-dad somewhere in LA’s San Fernando Valley. On her way to the beach with her friends, Tobe invites shy looking gas station attendant, Harlan (Edward Norton), to join them. His cowboy hat and general Old West demeanour amuse Tobe’s friends and intrigue the precocious teenager, leading to an affair that will take a few murky twists and turns before the films inevitably bloody end.

The juxtaposition of the modern American urban sprawl with Harlan’s Stetson hat and cowboy boots is mildly diverting, and the film is packed with dusty, dusky gliding shots of huge highway lanes and isolated electricity pylons, representing a new kind of frontier in the 21st century. Harlan appears to be far too genuine and nice to actually be genuine and nice and the signposting of his impending breakdown is a little too heavy-handed at times. As the film unfolds he begins to come apart at the seams and the obvious nod toward Taxi Driver in a motel room mirror scene is, perhaps, one knowing reference too many, but it is also a scene that an actor of Norton’s experience and ability probably relished precisely because of its self-consciousness.

Norton, who for once is starting to look his age in a number of close-ups, is outstanding as the cowpoke with some serious issues bubbling ominously under the surface. Wood builds on the promise she showed in 2004’s Thirteen, and Rory Culkin as her quiet, not-all-there brother is proving to be quite the young thespian. But unusually for a film starring Norton, it is the other male lead, David Morse, playing Wade the father of the family, who just about steals the show. Morse, who has been uniformly excellent in a variety of television shows and movies over the years, is terrifying, brutish and transfixing as the father figure, trying to cope with his tear away daughter, his disaffected son, and his daughter’s strange new boyfriend.
Having previously matched the talents of Jack Nicholson in Sean Penn’s The Crossing Guard, Morse is an actor of devastating ability who deserves to be given more chances to exercise his sizeable talent. His character, like all the others in this film, is not fleshed out to any considerable degree, but he manages to convey the most emotion through his mournful yet burning eyes, particularly in a potent scene where he jams a gun in Harlan’s face in an attempt to stop him from bothering his family.

Down in the Valley is an odd little film, in parts gripping, fantastically acted, but requiring an emotional investment in a character about whom we know next to nothing, in a story that is at times a bit too melodramatic for its own good…