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Rating: Starring:
James Taylor as the Driver
Dennis Wilson as the Mechanic
Laurie Bird as the Girl
Warren Oates as GTO
Of the four, the only professional actor is Warren Oates; in fact, James Taylor is 22 years old and is a singer-songwriter, Dennis Wilson (R.I.P.) is 26 and plays the drums for the Beach Boys, Laurie Bird is just 17 and is going to school to become a good photographer.
In 1971, Monte Hellman is practically unknown at home. Five years earlier, he had shot two films, both complex metaphysical westerns with a young Jack Nicholson, considered too strange to be distributed in the USA but already cult hits in France.
It's an atypical road movie for those times: the protagonists don't "move" out of protest or to assert their individual freedom against the system, arrogant authorities, or conventional society ("you guys aren't hippies, are you," asks a bar customer to the two long-haired men who just stare back, puzzled). It's just an existential void that leads the Driver and the Mechanic to wander along Route 66 in a heavily modified '55 Chevrolet to participate in both official and clandestine car races. They have no precise destination, perhaps just going to Ohio because there's a shop that sells parts at a good price. Their dialogues are sparse and focused exclusively on fixing the carburetor, the engine's power, the cars to challenge. They are defined by their roles; the Driver doesn't allow the Mechanic to drive the car, and in turn, he doesn't touch it to repair it. When the Girl, a drifter recently disembarked from another car, joins them, they welcome her without a word. She too is confined to her role as "female," to the point that when she tries to drive the car, she will admit and show that she can do much more. In contrast, GTO is a middle-aged braggart who drives around in a yellow Pontiac GTO sports car. To the hitchhikers he picks up along the road, he endlessly tells different stories about his life, which are actually built from bits of others': dice player, car tester, Vietnam vet.
The encounter-clash on the road between the two young men and GTO seems to give a vital boost to their respective weary wandering: a race to see who gets to Washington DC first, with the cars at stake. But this too turns out to be a fictitious goal destined to slowly fade away, towards which everyone loses interest, stopping at service stations, helping each other repair the cars, sharing the Girl, who drifts in and out of one’s life and then the other's, listening to their empty promises of a holiday on Miami's beaches or settling down (a weary GTO losing his swagger while admitting he'd go mad if he doesn't settle somewhere). In the end, she will leave all three of them to go with a young motorcyclist used in the same way as at the beginning of the film: getting on the motorcycle without saying a word.
The film is destined to fold in on itself and not evolve, ending with a race just as it began with one: the frames slow down, the film seems to burn, leaving the action on standby just like the existence of the Driver and the Mechanic.
Hellman's road is a very long, desertified, and stripped-down Route 66, now under the scorching sun and then under torrential rain, precisely to highlight the absolute nothingness of the characters' lives as they cross it; it's yet another accusation against American society, devoid of those impulses and emotional drives worth living to the fullest.
P.S.: Some reasons to love "Two-Lane Blacktop" (From director Richard Linklater's speech at the Austin Film Festival in March 2000):
Because it is the purest Road Movie ever made.
Because it feels like a car movie directed by a French New Wave filmmaker.
Because James Taylor seems like a refugee from a Robert Bresson film.
Because once upon a time there was a God on earth called Warren Oates.
Because there's an ongoing debate over who's the protagonist of this film, some say the '55 Chevrolet, others the Pontiac GTO.
Because it has the most cinematically pure ending in film history.
Because Warren Oates wears a different cashmere sweater for every occasion, and because, as usual, he has bottles of liquor in the trunk of the car.
Because, a rare thing in this world, it's a completely honest film.
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