Lindsay Lohan goes bold

It sounds like a perfect trifecta of sleaze: Paul Schrader — purveyor of feverish taxi drivers and raging bulls — directing Lindsay Lohan — promising to do nude scenes — in a script written by schlock-meister Brett Easton Ellis. It’s a movie called The Canyons, and you could be forgiven for not knowing it even exists.

Oh, but it’s out there. Schrader and Ellis shot the movie using friends’ money, then went to crowd-sourcing (Kickstarter) and other elaborate schemes to raise funds for the low-budget shoot. And it looks it.

The Canyons seems like it was shot on lo-def digital, and this might be part of its tacky aesthetic: after all, the story of the sick, unhealthy relationship between Tara (Lohan) and Christian (real-life porn star James Deen) set in the LA valley calls for faux-‘80s porn music, wooden acting, and a general numbness. Schrader definitely achieves the numbness, but I’m not sure it’s by design.

Tara is just your typical modern gal who spends her life “f***ing and shopping” until she decides to help Christian’s sister’s friend land a role in a cheap slasher movie. The friend, Ryan (Nolan Gerard Funk), puts up strong competition with Deen in the pouting and scowling department (they must have both studied Zoolander): they’re a couple of sneering douches trying to navigate the modern dating scene and get ahead in Hollywood.

Christian has moved beyond conventional dating, as we see in the opening scene, where, over dinner at a restaurant with Ryan and his girlfriend Gina (Amanda Brooks), he details his “relationship” with Tara — which involves inviting over random girls and dudes he’s vetted online for threesomes. But in truth, Christian has more of a “relationship” with his cell phone, which he keeps tapping on and caressing while other people are talking. It’s the kind of modern annoyance that makes you want to reach into the screen, grab the phone and smash it under your heel, then hand back the pieces to the offending douchebag.

But everyone plays with their cell phones in this movie. They have touchy-feely relationships with their gadgets, which may be screenwriter Ellis’s way of saying we’ve reached a new level of numbness and detachment from human connection. Or something.

It may also be part of a larger thesis hinted at by director Schrader, who begins and ends his movie with shots of dilapidated cinemas and closed-down multiplexes, as though to establish the kind of elegiac tone of Bogdonavich’s The Last Picture Show. The thesis goes something like this: movies are dead, nobody goes to see them in cinemas anymore (Lohan’s character says as much over dinner), and the industry is being replaced by an ever-growing army of douches shooting sex videos on their cell phones, who think they’re players.

Hooray for Hollywood!

This is such a provocative thesis that you have to jog your memory with a crowbar to recall that Schrader has already made a much better movie on this subject — 2002’s Auto Focus, about Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane’s descent into porn addiction. Then there’s 1992’s The Player, Robert Altman’s poison valentine to a Hollywood replaced by bean counters who don’t even like movies.

The Canyons wants to mean something, but it’s stuck with a plot that seems as cobbled-together as an SNL skit (Maybe “The Californians”?). The main problem may be that Schrader — never one to shy away from marking his auteur territory like a dog pissing on a fire hydrant — doesn’t really leave a strong enough impression here as a director. Rather, he surrenders his style to the numbed-out tone that is supplied by Ellis’s numbed-out lines and the numbed-out acting of Deen and Funk. I mean, come on, Paul! You directed Affliction and Cat People, for God’s sake! Take the reins!

Though much has been written about Lohan as a disaster waiting to happen onset (a New York Times article preceding release of The Canyons was typical in its title: “This Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan In Your Movie”), she’s not really the problem with The Canyons. Sure, her tabloid résumé is now lengthier than her screen credits, and her face seems bloated and waxy, and there’s more than a little emptiness behind those gray eyes — but when she acts, she still runs circles around the likes of non-pros Deen and Funk. One begins to suspect that Schrader and Ellis allowed media access onset to generate the kind of trainwreck-in-motion buzz that the Times article sparked, in order to market the thing. (It’s rumored that clips of Lohan’s nude scenes were pre-leaked to the Internet, in a modern example of art imitating Paris Hilton’s life.)

But the truth will out: the movie is kind of a shambles, with some interesting bits that don’t add up to a coherent — let alone affecting — narrative. Lohan agrees to expose herself in three nudie scenes, which should have some audience drawing power: a couch scene, a foursome in bed, and a shower scene that spells G-R-A-T-U-I-T-O-U-S. There’s another bit where Christian tries to get Ryan removed from the movie, so he enlists a gay film editor — under threat of firing him — to seduce Ryan (so Christian can film their encounter and use it as ammunition against Ryan? I’m not really clear on the motive). And the gay editor — who’s in a committed relationship with another guy, and obviously has principles — agrees to do it! Instead of just saying, “Fine! Your movie’s a piece of crap anyway, and I’d rather not work with sleazy douchebags, if possible!” But no, he just goes and does Christian’s bidding.

Of course things spiral out of hand, with murder and hidden cameras and lots of chain smoking and even a court-ordered psychiatrist (played by Gus Van Sant). But not even this adds up to a convincing movie.

Christian is that already familiar Brett Easton Ellis staple: a trust fund baby who tries to control everything around him so he can further his own perverted ends. Or else afford himself the luxury to sit around Canyon Hills mansions, lazing on the couch, looking bored and playing with his cell phone. It’s scenes like this, played out ad nauseam in The Canyons, that make you pray for a major earthquake to come. In Sensurround, please.