A mostly meaningless film about meaninglessness, Under the Silver Lake nonetheless has enough fetid charm to justify wasting a few hours on it. After all, the movie ultimately suggests that wasting our time is the best we can do in this rotten, rigged life. Andrew Garfield stars as Sam, an East L.A. burnout who gets drawn into a weird world of codes, clues, call girls, and conspiracies when a woman (Riley Keough) goes missing from his low-rent apartment complex. Think Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (or, better yet, Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of it), as well as Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski, and Shane Black’s The Nice Guys. Director David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) employs a woozy camera to capture Sam’s blinkered, increasing paranoia, but the highlight of the film is Garfield, who has never been this funny/disturbing. Unwashed and smelly (even before he’s sprayed by a skunk), Sam has a hazy, lazy drawl that’s offset by his nervous little walk. Constantly ingesting bad beer (you can feel its warmth in your hand), he spends the film swerving between enlightenment and delusion. Ideas about sex, pop culture, and religion are all at play, yet the real question driving the film isn’t if Sam finds any answers, but if it even matters.
