Cine-Trash – Track 29 – Column

Cine-Trash

Track 29 (Nicolas Roeg, 1988)
by William Ham

The pairing of Nic (The Man Who Fell to Earth) Roeg and the late screenwriter Dennis (The Singing Detective) Potter, two uniquely talented artists with similar takes on the fragmented, ambiguous nature of reality, must have seemed brilliant at the time. Of course, some thought the same thing of Quentin Tarantino and Oliver Stone. And like the latter match-up, the result is more bombastic and confused than edifying. Roeg’s wife, Teresa Russell, plays a bored, repressed suburban Hausfrau stuck in a dead-end marriage to a philandering doctor and model-train obsessive (Christopher Lloyd). She’s still pining for her son, conceived years past with a sleazy carnival worker and spirited away from her at birth. Enter the overactor’s overactor himself, Gary Oldman, as a mysterious drifter (what else?) who seems to be on a mission to liberate Russell from her tract-home shackles. The thing is, he may be just a figment of her imagination. Is he or isn’t he? Is he her long-lost son? Where did he get that bleach job? She doesn’t know, and neither will you by the end of this. What you do get is an unholy souffle of over-the-top performances (Sandra Bernhard plays Lloyd’s mistress, which should give you a clue right there), weird editing/camera foolery, and muddy Freudianism. I wish I’d seen this in a theater – then I’d know what the sound of a hundred people scratching their heads sounds like. Best scene: Lloyd’s impassioned (and interminable) speech to a zealous crowd at a toy-train convention. Reverend Jim would approve.