claire donner’s review published on Letterboxd:
I watched this movie A LOT as a kid. I watched it so much that, after a lapse, I became very afraid to watch it again. I have enough regrets about my youth, without posthumously heaping on whatever sins of taste and sense I can dig up. Still, I put myself through it, and I was happily surprised to find that it is more or less the movie I remember: Engagingly cartoonish, earnestly acted, and really impressively miserable. Naive wannabe crime writer David Duchovny and his struggling artist girlfriend Michelle Forbes pick up a couple of strangers to help finance their move across the country. While Duchovny is neck-deep in serial killer lore for his book, he fails to notice that Brad Pitt (as Early Grayce, who I can't help thinking may have been the basis for Early Cuyler) is slaying locals every time they stop for gas. Meanwhile, the more perceptive Forbes quizzes her hillbilly counterpart Juliette Lewis on her obviously sinister boyfriend, until they all find out exactly what they don't want to know. KALIFORNIA epitomizes the Unrated rentals of the early '90s: It is drenched in blood, punctuated by painstakingly simulated sex, fetishistically fixated on the redneck as a kind of new savage, and practically drowning in its own noirish mood. Miraculously, this movie never becomes overly ridiculous; it is shot through with an intense sincerity, both from director Dominic Cena, and the ensemble cast.
In particular, I fell in deep dark love with Michelle Forbes when I first saw it. This intelligent, tormented brunette was exactly who I thought I wanted to grow up to be at age 12 (and for however many years I ritualistically watched this movie). This time around, I was especially glad to revisit a scene in a slaughterhouse, where she's giving David Duchovny the business about his crush on the more primally macho Brad Pitt, despite the obvious darkness swirling around him. In her fervor, Forbes clearly-accidentally smacks her head on one of the dangling meathooks, and in a stroke of genius, Cena keeps it in. This small detail, in which someone who is desperately trying to be heard is suddenly undermined by a mundane little accident, makes the scene one of the most convincing adult arguments I can remember from a film.
So the movie's rhetoric isn't that interesting: Serial killers are beyond the reach of reason, and attempts to comprehend and control such deviance only cast shame on the pompous intellectual who thinks he is the equal of man's darker nature. However, there are some interesting scenes regarding the cultural gap between the city slickers and the yokels. Brad Pitt does a whole lot of menacing and torturing in this movie, but the most compelling moment comes when he tears into Michelle Forbes' photography. Up to then, Forbes has done a fine job of describing someone who has been through the ringer, artistically. She shoots confrontational images of raw sexuality, some of which she stars in, and needless to say, this is the most embarrassing kind of work to have torn apart by gallerists and critics over and over again. Having suffered thusly in Kentucky, it was her idea to move to California...and now she finds herself tied up on the floor with an evil hick criticizing each one of her prints, in more or less the same terms she's used to within her industry. Where cultured Michelle Forbes thinks she is probing the depths of human desire and instinct, she isn't totally capable of that kind of directness, so the work comes off as theatrical and desperate. While this may be clear to a curator, it's even clearer to a caveman like Brad Pitt who lives his entire life in pursuit of desire, at the behest of instinct.
And finally, the cherry on top--the thing that really justified my grownup rewatch of this movie: Toward the end of KALIFORNIA, there's a crazy little shoutout to Errol Morris' early masterpiece VERNON, FL, a documentary featuring monologues from a collection of eccentric old men living in a remote township with a jungle-like atmosphere. As Brad Pitt brandishes a shotgun at a Nevada rest stop cashier, he asks where the guy happens to be from, and he replies, "Vernon, Florida!" Brad Pitt then makes some remarks about all the great turkey hunting down there, in a clear reference to one of Morris' more memorable interviewees. I just about jumped out of my seat when I heard it, having watched VERNON, FL no fewer than ten times in the last couple of years. It was as if, even having put childish things away, KALIFORNIA never really left me, and has been looking over my shoulder all this time.