Zeroville movie review & film summary (2019)
Early in “Zeroville,” before the movie really loses its way around the half-hour mark, an editor played by Jacki Weaver shows our hero Vikar (Franco) how a crucial scene from “A Place in the Sun” is more interested in intimacy than continuity. She goes as far as to encourage Vikar, who’s going to become an editor himself, to say, “Fuck continuity.” It’s right there that I knew we were in trouble. Continuity has never been Franco’s strong suit as a filmmaker, and he’s clearly including this scene as a warm-up for what’s to come, as a film that’s already kind of loose and shapeless becomes an incoherent blob.
It starts promisingly enough. Vikar arrives in Hollywood in 1969, on the cusp of a revolution in the industry. He has an image of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor tattooed on the back of his bald head, and he’s sort of like a Zelig in these early scenes, as Franco turns “Zeroville” into something not unlike “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” in the way it blends tinseltown history with its fiction (in fact, the first scene features Vikar being accused of the Sharon Tate murders). There’s Ali McGraw flubbing a line on the set of “Love Story!” There’s Steven Spielberg talking about a shark movie he wants to make! There’s George Lucas talking about robots! As Vikar stares blankly at all of it, Seth Rogen and Weaver make engaging co-stars, but they then disappear as “Zeroville” becomes a story of Vikar’s relationship with a beautiful actress named Soledad Paladin (Megan Fox) and an angry producer named Rondell (Will Ferrell).
Set over many years, “Zeroville” charts the tumultuous relationship between Vikar and the film industry. I think. Maybe. Who knows, really? It’s a film that is constantly pushing back against any interpretation or even traditional narrative thrust thinking that we will be way more invested in Vikar's story than we ever remotely are. When Rondell laughs at the thought that Vikar could land a star as beautiful as Soledad, he then challenges the young man to come outside where he shows off his excess at a party ... by singing “Mickey’s Monkey” by The Miracles. As Franco and Fox share serious looks, Will Ferrell sings “Lum de lum de lai-ai” and I swear you’ve never seen anything like it. Is Franco satirizing excess? Maybe? But it’s so wooden and poorly shot that it doesn’t matter because it just reads as ridiculous. Franco doesn’t understand the difference between satirizing excess and just being excessive. He never has.
