Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Bernard Rose
Starring: Tony Todd, Danny Huston, Stephen Dorff, Matthew
Jacobs, Olivia D'Abo, Lena Gora, Rosie Fellner
Writer/director Bernard Rose reunites with his
Candyman star Tony Todd for this scabrous satire of
life in Los Angeles during the early days of the pandemic lockdown. Like
the many films hastily put together by restless filmmakers during that
unforeseen era, Traveling Light initially feels
directionless and you surmise it might be yet another case of a
filmmaker gathering a bunch of his mates for the sake of making
something rather than sitting around in their pyjamas. But such is
Rose's command that any such fears are soon dispelled as it becomes
clear he has fashioned arguably the best movie to emerge from these
unique circumstances.
Like those restless filmmakers who had to shoot something to keep their
sanity, Todd's Caddy is a man driven nuts by wallowing in his apartment,
his TV broadcasting an endless series of apocalyptic doom-mongering. To
get out of the house he decides to become an Uber driver. While driving
around the deserted streets of Los Angeles he keeps an eye out for his
son, who disappeared into the city's homeless underground a couple of
years earlier. As his car passes an unending stream of tents, it's clear
this is a futile search.
Caddy's new job sees him engage with the rest of the film's cast, most
of whom are affluent Angelinos who have fallen under the spell of Harry,
a possibly sinister cult leader who broadcasts mantras every morning,
and has today decided to invite a hand-picked group of his followers to
attend a gathering at a mansion in the Hollywood hills. Harry is played
by frequent Rose collaborator Danny Huston, so we suspect from
the off that he may have dodgy intentions. It's also notable that the
"guests" he invites to his gathering are a telling mix of middle-aged men and
attractive young women.
Roaming the streets of LA with his phone in hand is Arthur (Matthew Jacobs), one of those sad people who became hall monitors during the lockdown
and took a delight in exposing anyone not observing the rules to the
letter of the law. After fleeing a homeless couple he filmed for the
crime of standing closer than six feet together, he ends up in Caddy's
car, where he learns of Harry's gathering. Seeing this as the perfect
opportunity to get footage of a major lockdown breach, he enters the
mansion.
Traveling Light might be the key document of how we all
turned a little crazy in the early days of the pandemic, and how the
observation of rules became yet another battle in the ongoing culture
wars. Many conservatives denied there was any pandemic at all, gleefully
coughing on anyone who said otherwise, while a lot of liberals began
behaving like they had joined the Gestapo, delighting in exposing anyone
failing to obey the rules. Rose takes a step back and exposes both
parties, with Todd's Caddy caught in the middle, a man just trying to
get through another day surrounded by madness. Watching characters
behave like lunatics seems fictional, but then we remember that people
really did act like this back then, and some still continue to do
so.
A pioneer of digital filmmaking, Rose is one of the few filmmakers that
really knows how to create a beautiful image from zeroes and ones. Up
there with the best of Michael Mann's work,
Traveling Light is one of the most visually beautiful
pieces of digital filmmaking I've seen. Rose finds a magical quality in
the flashing neon of lockdown Los Angeles and the sun kissed hills that
surround the city. Had the movie been simply another lockdown film in
search of a narrative, its visuals would be enough for a recommend, but
Rose keeps us hooked with a blackly comic story that plays somewhere
between an Alan Rudolph movie and an episode of
Curb Your Enthusiasm. Shooting in May of 2020, Rose seems to have had the foresight to
realise that some day we'd look back on that time and have a guilty
laugh about how badly we behaved.
