Presenting: an independent, micro-budge feature so sparkling new that it doesn’t even have a web presence yet. Though my suspicion is that if writer-director Trace Burroughs has even a scrap of luck, 8 Behind the Wheel won’t remain in this state of absolute obscurity for very long. If the film suffers from some of the problems common to wee little homebrew films – chiefly, it embraces with both arms the peculiar tendency of such films to obsess over the psychological makeup of the sociopathic – the film’s form and structure are infinitely more ambitious than in just about any other film I can remember since I first started this side project of reviewing unreleased indies.
True to its title, the film presents eight persons driving cars at night in an unnamed city (though it was filmed in Connecticut). I was not at all points able to accurately identify which actor went with which character, as the characters’ given names are doled out erratically and at unexpected places, but the people involved range from a teenage pizza delivery girl to an old birthday clown, from a young man high off his nuts on shrooms to an angry and seemingly paranoid masseuse, from a man with distinct anger issues about women to a run-of-the-mill middle-aged man, to the Professor and Mary Ann – I mean, to an actress and a cop. We follow these eight people for 90 minutes, listening to their internal monologues as they drive along, learn that they are in many cases not at all the people we thought they were at first glance, and nearly nothing else happens till a surreally violent finale; there are only three or four points in the whole movie where we set foot outside of a car.
“That’s not ambitious”, you might say, “that is fucking goddamn boring.” Ah! but then, I haven’t told you the really miraculous & clever part about the film yet. See, these aren’t just eight people plucked at random. The more they drive about and think, the more clues we are given to slowly piece together that there is a truly knotty thread of interconnections that links all of them. And at the same time, the more we listen to their pages-long rambles, the clearer it becomes that we’re not eavesdropping on the arbitrary thoughts of weird and at times frankly perverted loners. It’s all one massive story, told in little bites in individual voices. Each individual is tapped in to one thread of a larger whole, telling in their own highly personal and idiosyncratic words what they know to be true about themselves and the other characters. It’s a bit like William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, or a collection of Raymond Carver short stories, in a way (of course, Faulkner and Carver haven’t really that much in common; think of 8 Behind the Wheel as the midway point between the two authors). There are two distinct “modes” of the narrative: first there is the combined story, second there is the personal story and voice of each character.
To make certain that we notice that this is something like eight short stories that all tally up to one, Burroughs films each character in a unique way: some of them are bogged down with film grain, some with color filters, some with lens flares; the music changes between characters, as do the styles of camera angles used. All told, the feeling we get is that there are eight 90-minute films proceeding in tandem, and we are being switched from one to the other at arbitrary intervals. Sometimes, the combination of the two films is enlightening and revealing; sometimes it’s just jarring. It’s always interesting.
Now, that plot that all these disparate parts link up to create: I’m not going to give it away, or even hint at its outline, and not just because I don’t want to be a spoiler. Frankly, I don’t know that the plot is whatsoever the point – not when the construction of the film is so peculiar and rewarding as this. In other words, though I agree that it is worth reconstructing the story from its eight components, I don’t think the reason to do that is so that you can then consider the story and think about what it means. I think the reason is to demonstrate that the story can be thus reconstructed, turning the movie into not much more than a formal puzzle, but if one-hundredth of the films that came out every year where such puzzles, we’d all be a great deal smarter as movie watchers. It’s hard to say if 8 Behind the Wheel adds up to much, and I don’t even know what “adds up to” means in this context; but I do know that it’s nervy and stylish and perfectly brilliant.
9/10