Years
before becoming the first female filmmaker to win the Academy Award for Best
Director for 2008’s The Hurt Locker,
writer-director Kathryn Bigelow first burst onto the cinema scene in 1982 with
her collaborative effort with one-time co-director Monty Montgomery. Montgomery would later go on to become a
frequent executive producer (and occasional star) of David Lynch films
including Wild at Heart, but in 1982
Montgomery and Bigelow were newcomers. With
their debut film, the outlaw biker period drama The Loveless, viewers got an early look not only at a major
filmmaking talent in the developmental stages but also got to feast their eyes
upon the credited acting debut of one of the industry’s finest and most beloved
performers: Willem Dafoe.
Set
in the late 1950s US, The Loveless is
an ensemble piece largely lead by Dafoe concerning a motorcycle gang who roll
into a small southern town on their way to the Daytona races. The band of outsiders are immediately seen as
riff-raff by the locals who don’t take kindly to their boorish and vandalistic behavior. Tensions, however, risk exploding through the
roof when biker Vance (Willem Dafoe) develops romantic relations with local
girl Telena (Marin Kanter), stirring the rage of her abusive and drunken
father. Much like Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, the film plays like
a day in the lives of the ensemble cast of characters before it becomes apparent
everyone is sitting on a ticking time bomb waiting to detonate.
Willem
Dafoe is a legend by now and seeing him so young at such an early stage of his
career in The Loveless marks the
arrival of one of the silver screen’s greatest performers. Driven by nuance, subtlety and just enough
alpha-male sex appeal to draw comparisons to Marlon Brando’s own The Wild One, Dafoe makes Vance both the
film’s hero and as much of a fly on the wall as the viewer. Dafoe knows full well who he is from the
ground up and yet finds himself wanting less and less involvement with the
group he’s in. A strong and tragic
counterpoint to Dafoe’s doomed existence on the road is Marin Kanter as the
local rich neighborhood girl he meets on the way. Where most everyone else sees Dafoe’s
character as adversarial, she sees the vulnerability and might be the only real
way out for Dafoe.
Visually,
Bigelow’s first is handsomely lensed by Doyle Smith, capturing the rugged
terrain of the small southern town beautifully though Bigelow’s next project
uniting her with James Cameron cinematographer Adam Greenberg would drastically
alter and forever shape the look we’ve come to expect from her films. The film’s other quasi-main character, Davis,
happens to be played by the film’s composer, Robert Gordon, who provides a
moody period score coupled with subtle additional contributions by John
Lurie. The result is a deeply southern
fried score which perfectly suits the setting and mood of the film.
Fans
of Bigelow’s celebrated vampire film Near
Dark will pick up on her fixations immediately in The Loveless, focusing on dangerous outcast men typically within a
biker gang and the ways with which an enclosed group of people can ignite a
violent outburst. Though steeped in the
1950s, watching The Loveless and it’s
biker greasers will no doubt remind some viewers of Penelope Spheeris’ punk
rock documentary classic The Decline of
Western Civilization. Though lacking
the punch felt in her subsequent feature Near
Dark, Bigelow’s first feature turn in the director’s chair cements her as
an identifiable cinematic voice keenly interested in what makes the male outlaw
tick.
-Andrew Kotwicki
