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| ‘Candy Mountain’ By Hal Hinson Washington Post Staff Writer August 06, 1988 | ||
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Directed by Robert Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer, "Candy Mountain" feels like something out of a time capsule, like a relic from a remote but treasured time. It begins in New York City with a rather vague young lad with a head full of rock dreams named Julius (Kevin O'Connor) who walks off his job as a carpenter to devote himself full-time to music. The problem with Julius, though, is that his talents don't match his ambitions. Jumping at the chance to sub with the backup band for a rocker named Keith (David Johansen), he attracts special attention.
"How long you been playing that thing, kid?" the leader asks.
"A year," says Julius meekly.
"Yeah? On what planet?"
The atmosphere of these opening backstage scenes, in which Keith and some music business types reminisce about a legendary guitar maker named Elmore Silk who dropped out of sight some years back, is dark and smoky, and in them the filmmakers show a keen ear for knowing show biz patter. "You're telling me he disappeared," Keith says. "You'd think he'd signed with William Morris or something."
For a variety of reasons -- not the least of which being that the market value of his instruments has climbed to around $20,000 -- these men would like to find Silk. Clumsily seizing the opportunity, Julius says he worshiped the reclusive artist ("he was to the guitar what Willie Mays was to football") and claims to have been his friend. Not entirely convinced, the group decides to give the kid a chance. They stuff $2,000 in expense money into his pocket and send him out on the road.
From this point the movie (taken from Wurlitzer's screenplay) becomes essentially a loose series of encounters and interviews with the reclusive guitar maker's relatives or people who've known him. It takes the form of a classic road movie, and though Silk remains offscreen until the end, he dominates the picture, and the search for him provides a spine to connect the vignettes. After his girlfriend ditches him and runs off with the car, Julius is given a bit of sage advice ("Life ain't no candy mountain") by a toothless truck driver (Rockets Redglare), who bilks him out of $50 and deposits him at the front doorstep of Silk's brother Al (Tom Waits).
The people in "Candy Mountain" fall into two groups: those who have it made and the ones who wish they did. Al is definitely in the first group. Clad in eye-shock blue slacks and a yellow cardigan, he practices his putting in the back yard with a bottle of Jack Daniel's at hand. Chomping on his cigar, he tells Julius that the road isn't what it used to be and advises him to give it up. "You should be playing golf. You're young. You should be playing a lot of golf."
The road in "Candy Mountain" carries all the metaphorical weight it did for Kerouac in the '50s and for countless others since then. For Julius, there's a big score down the road. If he can track Silk down, if he can corral one of Silk's guitars for himself, he'll have enough dough to, as he says, "get in the game."
O'Connor, who was far from impressive as Hemingway in Alan Rudolph's "The Moderns," has a difficult job here. In a sense he's supposed to be less interesting than the characters he encounters along the way, and it would be easy to overlook the little things -- like the nervous tremor he puts in Julius' voice -- he does to sustain our interest.
As the road takes him up into Canada, he finds a Frenchwoman (Bulle Ogier) with whom Silk had an affair. And as she tells him her story, with the cruel wind whipping around the outside of her cabin, he comes across as a likable, if slightly doltish, kid. The movie celebrates the marginal, and it's characters like the one played by Ogier or the father and son (Roberts Blossom and Leon Redbone) who toss Julius in jail after he runs off the road and into their boat, who appeal to the filmmakers. They have staked their claim, and it's far away from the main roads.
When Silk (Harris Yulin) finally makes his entrance, his cagey and slightly malevolent air seems perfect. There's a hint of disgust in it. And it becomes immediately apparent, though perhaps not to Julius, that the trip was a waste of time. There's nothing despairing in this realization, though; it's uplifting, almost ecstatic. You can feel that something has shifted in Julius at the end, as he braces himself against the cold and heads back in the direction he came. But perhaps not. And somehow the thought that nothing may have happenedl except that he put in the miles, seems the best conclusion of all.
Candy Mountain, at the Biograph, is rated R and contains some adult situations and language.
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