By Mark Fields
Genre Mishmash Blunts Its Own Potential
It’s difficult to know what kind of movie Loves Lies Bleeding intends to be. Is it a ‘roid-fueled gay love story set against the tawdry backdrop of professional bodybuilding? Or is it a tense, blood-soaked family drama depicting the corrosive effects of criminality on the ties that are supposed to bind? Or is it some perverse, wrong-side-of-the-tracks super-hero saga promoting the saving power of illegal performance drugs?
Strangely, Loves Lies Bleeding draws incompatibly and unsuccessfully from all three of these subgenres, and likely throws in a few more film references for good measure. The result, a mishmash of styles that careen from one to another without reason or warning, ultimately fails to deliver either a rewarding movie-going experience or a clear narrative perspective from its writer-director Rose Glass and her writing collaborator Weronika Tofilska.
The premise was not without promise. Kristen Stewart plays Lou (Louise), an intelligent but aimless manager of a forlorn bodybuilding club in the small-town desert West in 1989. She falls for Jackie, a drifter stopping in town on her way for a competition in Las Vegas. Lou offers to help Jackie prepare by sharing her stash of steroids.
An act of charity gone violently too far enmeshes them in the criminal activities of Lou’s petty hoodlum father, Lou Sr. (played by Ed Harris in a tragically laughable wig). Missteps and coincidences pile up and build toward some sort of deadly stand-off between Lou and Jackie and her father.
The talents of the cast are wasted on this uber-violent, uber-vacant story. All the characters are flawed to the degree that it is hard to sympathize with any of them; just as it is difficult to care about their fates. Stewart has developed a honorable reputation for seeking challenging roles in unconventional movie material. Love Lies Bleeding fits that bill, sort of, but forgets to engage the audience in its cause.
