PARK CITY – I was tempted to call Jake Paltrow’s dystopic sci-fi “Young Ones” ambitious, but is it really? Paltrow’s primary ambition seems to be being compared to better filmmakers, but the bits of homage add up to a disappointing and even dull movie.
“Young Ones” is set in an American desert wasteland somewhere in the future when most of the water has run out and what is left is siphoned off by government pipelines. The citizens barely subsist on water that’s tightly rationed and sold at pumps like gasoline, with packets of government-provided mush arriving for sustenance. States have apparently gone to war, and occasional snippets of short-wave radio broadcasts tell us about rebel skirmishes somewhere out there in the distance. People have figured out how to wash clothes and even clean dishes without water.
A hardy Mad Max-type survivor, Ernest (Michael Shannon) is handy with a shotgun and fiercely protective of an almost-dry well that bandits frequently try to rob, though it’s locked in a shed. He and his son Jerome (Kodi Smit-McPhee, who learned to wander empty landscapes in “The Road”) eke out a living delivering supplies to pipeline workers on a donkey, but when that dies Ernest buys a kind of mechanical donkey (a basket on four robotic legs) at auction by outbidding the boyfriend (Nicholas Hoult of “Warm Bodies” and “About a Boy”) of his daughter (Elle Fanning). Treachery beckons as everyone scrambles to stay alive.
A lot of imagination went into the setting, and for a low-budget movie “Young Ones” has a lot of atmosphere and even some special effects. The film is broken into titled chapters a la Sergio Leone for a self-consciously epic feel (complete with the kinds of musical cues you might hear in a Leone film) and Paltrow does some arty things with the camera, but there is very little forward movement to the draggy and semi-coherent story. I was shocked to learn it’s only 100 minutes; I would have guessed it was two full hours. For a sci-fi film, “Young Ones” is fatally talky and exposition-laden (even in several Leone-style showdown scenes) and almost completely devoid of the pleasing action scenes of the Mad Max movies. I can see the film becoming a cult item, and I wouldn’t be surprised if its visual flair earned Paltrow a chance to work with a bigger budget (and a better screenwriter than the one he chose for this one — Jake Paltrow), but “Young Ones” is strictly aimed at the arthouse ghetto, not the mainstream.