SAN ANTONIO — In the year 2035, a thin mustachioed man named James Preble (Kentucker Audley), who looks as though cracking a smile is his definition of pain, knocks on the door of a Pepto Bismol-colored home in the middle of nowhere. An elderly woman wearing a helmet adorned by Christmasey-looking lights greets him. This is Penny Fuller's Arabella Isadora – “Bella,” for short – and James has arrived to perform an audit on her taxes.
She does more than oblige, welcoming him to stay in the home as he gets to work. For James, that means slipping into a flimsy helmet nearly as big as he is tall, with glowing tin-can goggles for eyes, and diving into the boxes of Bella’s taxes. Instead of W-2s, inside are cassette tapes. James is auditing her dreams.
Would you believe it if I said that’s only where the weirdness of “Strawberry Mansion” begins?
A stylistically boundless experiment fit for a world that’s belatedly embraced the anti-capitalist fever dream that is “Speed Racer,” and for a moviegoing populace desperately needing a new benchmark for what we’re talking about when we call a movie Lynchian, “Strawberry Mansion” plays like the gnarliest episode “The Twilight Zone” never aired. There are talking flies, there are rats in sailors’ uniforms, there are saxophone-playing frogs, there are paper-mache meteors with faces.
Most importantly, there’s a logical (or logical enough) anchor to all the surreal twists and turns, and that’s James’s job as an explorer of dreams. In the colorful and mighty crazy world that Audley and Albert Briney have – sorry – dreamed up as the movie’s co-directors and co-writers, corporate ambitions have grown so hungry that their talons have sunk into the last place we have that’s entirely our own—the places we go to when we go to sleep.
In a storytelling flourish that sounds less far-fetched the more you dwell on it, ads invade dreams in the time and place of “Strawberry Mansion,” and James is a prime target audience. His dreams are more like traps, keeping him confined to a tiny room where the only sustenance arrives via annoyingly cheerful corporate mascot, carrying fried chicken and red cola. In this movie, you won’t find stronger symbols for artificiality and the decline of good taste. Audley’s lead turn is practically serrated by a deeply entrenched longing, evident in the way he shuffles through the motions and sighs miserably with this eyes before ordering a milkshake of blended chicken and mashed potatoes at the drive-thru stand just to shut the electronic chicken on the screen up.
Smartly, Audley and Briney’s script relegates this world-building to a tight scope, keeping the larger picture to the stuff of terrifying implication, as well as our own growing anxieties that dreams may not be off-limits to advertisers in our own real world for much longer. But the duo’s priorities are more psychological than sociopolitical, and it’s hard not to feel a burst of anguish for James when Bella’s own dreams – liberated from ads, thanks to her efforts over several years – turn out to be a vivid oasis where anything is still possible and stop-motion skeletons dance under the sunlight. There’s not much in the way of passion for James in the real world, but here he might even have a chance at love. I’ll leave that particular suggestion at that.
By the time a blue skull-masked demon plucks a ship out of the wide-open sea like it was a toy in a bathtub, you might think you were dreaming. I’m sure that’s at least partially the film’s aim. The thing that keep us invested and not merely amused is how its heart grows in proportion with its imagination. Perhaps inevitably it gets too fanciful for its own good, but I wager that’s part of what makes it so special when you can blueprint the plots of most blockbusters on your way to seeing them. “Strawberry Mansion” is partially a movie about the perils of conforming, and it never does.
Audley and Birney’s film thrives on their free-wheeling aesthetic approach and spontaneity. But there is a plot driving “Strawberry Mansion,” and things briefly grind to a halt whenever narrative trajectory is forced to assert itself over a mood that’s constantly shapeshifting. And for a 90-minute movie, there are points where you wish they spread their themes just a little bit more over the canvas of their beguiling imagery.
Those are minor complaints for a movie as bountiful and as bold as “Strawberry Mansion.” The more reality turns mundane, the more vivid the escape becomes, and the co-directors’ ethos feels self-reflexive in this regard even before an antagonist declares “You don’t even know what you want until I give it to you.” The message rings loud and undeniably clear for anyone who’s spent time worrying about our increasing monoculture, but there’s a silver lining in the possibility that something like “Strawberry Mansion” could very well do its own part to create a stronger desire for unpredictable, unmoored and unrepentantly imaginative filmmaking such as this. It’s as much about movies as it is about dreams. After all, aren’t they the same thing?
"Strawberry Mansion" is not rated. It's now available to rent on digital platforms.
Starring: Kentucker Audley, Albert Birney, Penny Fuller, Reed Birney
Directed by Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney
2022
---
MORE REVIEWS:
- ‘Cyrano’ Review: Peter Dinklage is a heartbreaking tour de force in Joe Wright’s romantic epic
- ‘A Banquet’ Review: Elusive horror-drama paints in broad, moody strokes
- ‘The Sky is Everywhere’ Review: Teenagerdom is an emotional pinball machine in Josephine Decker’s playful embrace of YA formula
- Movie reviews: 'Uncharted' is fun but not exactly off the charts
- ‘Sundown’ Review: Tim Roth leads a meandering, oddly mesmerizing thriller
