After Track 29, the "Chattanooga Choo Choo" may never sound the same again. The song gives the movie its title (you know—"Track 29/Boy you can give me a shine"), and it's prominently featured in a sequence in which a doctor gives a rousing revival speech before an audience of railroad enthusiasts, at the same time a truck is crashing through his house, where his wife's fantasy child is trashing the doctor's elaborate computer-operated train set.
This thumbnail description doesn't being to convey the madness of the sequence, so you can imagine what watching it is like. The perpetrators of Track 29 are two of Britain's most provocative talents: director Nicolas Roeg, the creator of Performance and The Man Who Fell to Earth, and screenwriter Dennis Potter, who previously wrote Pennies from Heaven and Dreamchild.
Roeg and Potter seem to have egged each other on, into the far reaches of the bizarre. Track 29 tells the tale of a bored housewife (Theresa Russell, who is also Roeg's wife) in a small town in the American South.
Stultified by her marriage to a doctor (Christopher Lloyd) who prefers the company of his train set, she becomes intrigued by the presence of a young Englishman (Gary Oldman, who played Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy).
The drifter says he is her long-lost son who was taken away from her when she was 15 years old and unmarried. She believes him, despite the fact that he appears to be her own age. But then again, it becomes increasingly apparent that the young man exists only in her mind—that he is born out of her frustration and her desire to have a child.
Her husband considers her "totally loco" (no train pun intended); he's busy spending time with a nurse (Sandra Bernhard) who spanks him while they listen to tape-recorded railroad sounds.
The whole thing plays like something Tennessee Williams might have written after a really, really lost weekend. There is some tired satire of American society, but most of the film examines the peculiar psychosexual unhappiness of the Theresa Russell character. Russell, the star of Black Widow, is a good, daring actress, but there's never much more than sheer kinkiness at play here, and she has little opportunity to create a performance.
Roeg's films are getting stranger. They were always odd, but they used to be weird-brilliant, or at least weird-interesting. Now they're just weird-weird. We have a right to expect more.
First published in the Herald, October 7, 1988
This movie must have some defenders, but I've never heard of it crawling up to the level of cult film or anything like that. I stand by everything but the last line of the review; we don't really have a right to expect anything, and a filmmaker like Roeg can do what he wants. I wish this movie had worked, though.
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2012 at 3:00 am and is filed under 1988, Trucks.	You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.