Highway (Rental)

What’s in a name? Ah, the eternal question, asked by everyone from Shakespeare to Engelbert Humperdinck. The answer? Well, that varies. If you happen to run a movie studio, though, the answer is “everything�. One successful movie can keep a director in work for years; one burst of notoriety can keep an actor’s name on the A-list through a half dozen really bad performances. And if you’re a screenwriter, once you’ve gotten your name on a couple of box office hits, you can cheerfully blurt out your laundry list on a piece of scrap paper and sell it to the highest bidder. This is, of course, a known fact. Why it keeps on happening, though, is a complete mystery.

Scott Rosenberg is a name that may be well familiar to regular moviegoers. Beloved by studios for his ability to write big, hell-yeah hits like Con Air and Gone in 60 Seconds and the occasional teen-pleaser like Disturbing Behaviour, his knack for the full-throttle, gritty and testosterone-packed belies a hidden skill at penning remarkably human screenplays. Beautiful Girls was one of his. He contributed to the script for the superb High Fidelity. The man, it seems, can do no wrong. Until now, anyway.

Highway was originally titled, believe it or not, Leonard Cohen Afterworld (huh?). But after that, it spent a good long time as Trip, and it’s that title which is the most appropriate to what’s ended up on the screen here - Highway makes it sound like a cheesy thriller, which it certainly is not. No, this is a road movie, yet another cinematic chronicle of a group of people travelling the highways and back roads of America with a destination in mind, a lot of past behind them and a lot of learning about each other to do on the way. In this case, it’s early 1994 and the passengers are pool-boy (!) Jack (Jared Leto) and drug-obsessed Pilot (Jake Gyllenhaal), who run from Vegas to Seattle for their own individual reasons. For Jack, it’s an escape from a nasty beating at the hands of the husband of the woman he’s been pool-boying for, while for Pilot, it’s the chance to reunite with the girl of his dreams and sell some substances while he’s getting there. Along the way they of course have many adventures, mostly involving copious quantities of drugs. Being young and fertile, they visit a desert brothel. Being young and curious, they visit Alligator Boy in a hick town. And being best friends without fully realising how much that actually means, they fight and argue and inevitably fall out. Oh, and Jack, the self-confessed “sex god�, meets a woman (Selma Blair) who he actually cares about. More drugs happen. Meanwhile, up in Seattle, Kurt Cobain does himself in, but despite that fact being a major selling point of the film, it’s pretty much irrelevant to the plot save for one small detail.

No, this is pretty much your standard '60s-style road-trip flick, albeit with a bit more of an “edge� to it (“Stanley, did you say the Q word?�) but with one key flaw - we simply don’t care about these people. Not until it’s way too late in the film, at any rate, and then only because Selma Blair’s character of Cassie is written with more than a single dimension to her. The redemption she finds with Jack gives the film a human centre, but it’s not enough; watching two loud, boorish kids dropping acid and smashing stuff is annoying enough that you’re cheering on the Kenny Rogers lookalikes that want to beat them up. Ultimately, everyone becomes human, but way too late; if we’d seen deeper into these characters sooner than 85 minutes into the film, maybe we’d actually have cared about them.

Not helping much is the direction, by James Cox - who was, according to the IMDB, pulled out of film school by New Line to helm this, his first feature. Cox obviously has visual flair, and he uses the wide frame particularly well. But his inexperience is all too apparent in the dramatic department, and his over-use of stylised cut-aways and jump-cut editing wears out its welcome very quickly (incidentally, editor Craig Wood appears to be an Australian expat - his earliest credits include Alex Proyas’s superb feature debut Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds and subsequent short Welcome to Crateland).

A curious blend of post-grunge self-pity, flower-power euphoria and traditional road movie (complete with Jack Kerouac quote at the end), Highway is a textbook example of how even a “name� writer can deliver the occasional misfire and how, blinded by the shining lights around that name, a studio simply doesn’t notice. Until, of course, the movie premieres. On home video.

It’s getting really, really boring writing reviews of Roadshow DVDs, simply because these people seem almost incapable of delivering anything less than perfect technical quality on their discs; Highway is no exception. The film transfer (which would have been commissioned by original studio New Line, of course) is absolutely spot-on, taking full advantage of the sumptuous widescreen visuals that are part and parcel of any well-shot road flick. Correctly framed at 2.35:1 and 16:9 enhanced, this video transfer is razor-sharp, crystal clear and wonderfully vibrant, and there’s absolutely nothing to complain about save for some minor film damage on an opening credit shot (which looks to have been the result of a rather extreme optical effect anyway). It’s a state of the art transfer.

The movie is stored on a single-layered disc, which is fine considering the 93-minute feature has almost the entire platter to itself. There are no compression problems at all.

What would have been the theatrical Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack (had the movie been released theatrically!) is supplied here and serves the movie well, with the all-important (and occasionally, as with a drawn-out drug-dealer monologue, all-annoying) dialogue reproduced with razor-sharp clarity, and the generic-grunge music score suitably, err, grungy across the front soundstage. The score, by the way, is credited to “RICH ROBINSON OF THE BLACK CROWES� in the best example of on-screen insecurity we’ve seen all year.

Those with 5.1 surround systems will get a kick out of the sound effect which accompanies the New Line logo at the start of the film. The ball in a roulette wheel is launched in motion and travels around the room in an effect that’s right up there with those old-time ping-pong stereo demo records! It’s not at all relevant to the movie itself (aside from a tenuous Vegas connection) but it makes for great show-off material. Aside from that, surround use is sporadic and unremarkable, with the rears mostly handling atmospherics.

There’s nothing here in the way of extras aside from a theatrical trailer (2.35:1 letterboxed and 16:9 enhanced with stereo sound) and the usual Roadshow Dolby Digital show-off promo (in this case, the original and best of them - “Train�).

Don’t feel too bad, though. New Line’s US disc didn’t even include those.

The seeds of a good concept have been left completely unused in Highway, which turns out to be Another Bloody Coming-of-Age Road Movie - one which boasts an excellent cast who are left high and dry by an awful screenplay and the unsure hand of a first-time director. Roadshow’s decision to release this one as a rental title seems wise; not too many people would want to see this one more than once.

Technically, though, the disc is typically excellent, another fine job from a company that is making an art form out of getting it right.