Down In The Valley

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Over the past ten years or so Edward Norton has become one of my favorite actors. Even in films I haven't particularly cared for, like "Fight Club" and "The Score," he's been the best part of the show; and in films I have really enjoyed, like "American History X" and "25th Hour," he's made them all the better. So it is with 2005's "Down in the Valley," a somewhat jumbled, postmodern, suburban Western, which he pretty much carries despite the film's shortcomings. Norton is an actor to watch.

There is always something a little unsettling about Norton's movie characters, something hidden behind the disarming smile and the modest, boy-next-door charm. His work in "The Illusionist," made at about the same time as "Down in the Valley," is another good example. We're never quite sure if his characters are for real or if they're all a trick of the eye. Here, he plays Harlan, a sweet, gentle, unassuming fellow who says he's from South Dakota and works in ranching. We assume he's a modern cowboy. But is he?

The "Valley" of the title is not some romanticized Red River Valley of movie and dime-novel fame; it's Southern California's San Fernando Valley. And "Down" is more than apt; this psychological character study is nothing to make you sing and dance.

The writer and director, David Jacobson, sets the movie's conflicting moods in motion with a song, "Fly, Sparrow, Fly," by Peter Salett over the opening titles. It's a quiet ballad, all about the need to be free, yet with a melancholy undertone. Further such background songs by Salett and others continue his theme, as the filmmaker introduces us to the hero, a fellow named Harlan (Norton), who works in a gas station but looks and acts like a rancher and has never seen the beach. A young girl he meets, Tobe (Evan Rachel Wood), offers to show him the beach, and much, much more.

Tobe, short for October, is a senior in high school, rather aimless in her ambitions, living in the Valley with her single dad, Wade (David Morse), a corrections officer seriously overprotective of his daughter; and her younger, thirteen-year brother, Lonnie (Rory Culkin), a timid boy afraid of the dark. You might already see how the Cowboy disrupts their dull, drab lives of quiet desperation.

Tobe immediately takes a fancy to Harlan, and a romance ensues, much to the consternation of the father, who takes an immediate dislike of Harlan. Maybe the father sees Harlan for something other than what he claims; or maybe the father sees that the difference in their ages can never work out (Norton was about thirty-six when he made the movie, Wood eighteen). Be that as it may, the movie never clarifies Harlan's age, and perhaps the filmmakers meant him to be younger than Norton's actual age. Certainly, Norton looks younger than his years. In any case, the father becomes downright hostile and violent toward the guy.

Harlan, for his part, seems like a perfect gentleman, soft-spoken and kind. The question is whether Harlan is all he appears to be. Is he really the wholesome, Jimmy Stewart type, the simple down-home boy with a good heart and love for personal freedom and wide-open spaces? Is he really a Dakota cowboy or just a Valley wannabe? Or is there something even more unusual, perhaps more sinister, lurking under the surface?

Harlan tells Tobe, "You can even be anybody you want to be. You just have to decide on it and then just do it." So, he's a cowboy, to the extent that he sometimes even packs a pair of six-guns and playacts at facing down the bad guys, and he really is a deadly shot.

When they sneak off on their own, Harlan and Tobe's relationship seems ideal, too good to be true. But when Harlan "borrows" a horse to take Tobe riding and they both wind up in the back of a police car, we begin to wonder where his head is.

Tobe's father does the best he can, but the girl's got spirit, so what can he do? He thinks the boyfriend is a nut case, but he can't stop his daughter from sneaking off at all hours. Therefore, we get a rebellious teen in love with a much older guy who may or may not be all he seems; a father at his wit's end; and a boy who would probably rather have Harlan as his father than his real dad.

It's a good setup for dealing with themes of alienation, delusion, and lack of direction, some of the effects of modern society on people young and old. It's the movie's second half that lets it down as it quickly muddies the water, going too far over the top in trying to shock and to moralize. Harlan, who may be conning himself as much as he's conning others, becomes ever more bizarre in his behavior; and the writer/director tries much too hard to demythologize the cult of the Western hero and place the blame for society's woes on the way our movies, television shows, songs, and literature distort our reality. Harlan is no Kirk Douglas in "Lonely Are the Brave," longing for the old life of open ranges, freedom of movement, and personal identity in a world now boxed in by roads and fences. "Down in the Valley" becomes more like a psychotic dream.

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