Too Late

Writer/director Dennis Hauck’s début feature Too Late stars John Hawkes as an LA private eye looking for a missing woman. Along the way the world-weary gumshoe tangles with tough mugs, small-time drug dealers, midlevel mobsters, good-hearted strippers, hard-hearted strippers, flunkies, floozies, and femme fatales, and he exchanges hyper-stylized film noir meta-dialogue with each one of them.  This extraordinarily self-conscious slow-burning crime thriller aims to pay homage to the old movies it riffs on more than it attempts to explore the psychology of its characters. Yet Hauck isn’t the typical post-film-school brat simply riffing on old masters, like Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and Otto Preminger, and the new masters who’ve already riffed on those old masters, like Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, and Brian DePalma. Hauck is aping all these filmmakers (and many others), but he does so in a way that comes across as both novel in approach and as well versed in the traditions he shamelessly appropriates.

Too Late is told in five acts, each a chapter in the mystery story. Like so many young genre filmmakers who came of age in the wake of Quinton Tarantino, Hauck tells his story out of chronological order. Fortunately, this non-linear construction is not the picture’s most notable or signature conceit. Too Late distinguishes itself by putting forth each of its five acts via a single, unbroken, twenty to twenty-two minute shot, expertly photographed by Bill Fernandez in 35mm film. Of course, long, elaborately choreographed camera set-ups are nothing new in movies. The practice dates back to silent cinema with directors ranging from F. W. Murnau to Buster Keaton. In the modern digital age, the length of a shot is no longer limited by how much film can run through a camera at a time. Digitally produced single-take features have been around since the turn of the millennium—from Mike Figgis’ Timecode (2000) to Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria (2015). And multiple shots can now be seamlessly blended together to create the illusion of a shot, or even an entire movie, taking place entirely in real time—as with Silent House (both the 2010 Uruguayan original and the 2011 American remake) and Birdman (the 2014 Best Picture Oscar winner).  When shooting and editing strictly in 35mm, however, shots are restricted to the length of each film roll. For nearly all formats, that duration lasts about eleven minutes, which is why pre-digital movies that attempt this technique, like Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), require awkward cut points every ten minutes or so.

The Techniscope process Hauck employs for Too Late is different. It produces twenty-two minutes of footage per roll of 35mm film by utilizing only two perforations of camera negative, instead of the usual four. Because of this format’s cost savings properties it was popular with European filmmakers of the ‘60s, like Sergio Leone (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) and Jean-Luc Godard (Pierrot le fou), as well as independent American filmmakers of the ‘70s like Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop) and George Lucas (American Graffiti). The process creates a widescreen image by exposing half the standard amount of negative as it goes through the camera. Rather than shoot with anamorphic lens to squeeze extra picture information onto the standard four-perforation frame area, Techniscope cuts the negative size in half, reducing the image resolution by fifty percent, but also yielding twice as many frames for each roll of film. Thus, Techniscope enables a director to shoot twice as much on each camera load. A few contemporary directors like David O. Russell (Silver Linings Playbook) still use this process, presumably because they can run their cameras longer when improvising with their actors. To my knowledge, Too Late is the first film that utilizes Techniscope to enable extra-long shots. The approximately twenty-minute running time of each shot makes each act of Too Late feel substantial without becoming monotonous.

The painstaking blocking of its actors, camera, sets, and props necessary to achieve the unbroken takes, as well as the limitations imposed by its non-linear five act structure, gives Too Late a theatrical quality which may alienate some viewers. But Hauck’s studied style works in concert with his unabashed embrace of genre tropes and the agreeable rhythms of his ornate dialog. The picture continually references not only other films, but also the act of watching films. We get a meditation on how real life would play out if it were a movie, shout outs to LA’s beloved revival houses the New Beverly and the Egyptian, scenes that take place inside a projection booth and outside a concession stand, and references to art-house favorites Alan Rudolph and Abel Ferrara. Hawkes’ plays his shambling shamus like Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlow in The Long Goodbye possessed with an intimate knowledge of cinema—even knowing what reel of Carnival of Souls is playing in the background at the drive-in theater while he confronts a former flame.

Although not all of this shoot-the-works determination succeeds, it’s difficult not to admire the movie’s ambition. Some members of the cast—which features Robert Forster, Jeff Fahey, Joanna Cassidy, Crystal Reed, Sydney Tamiia Poitier, and Dichen Lachman—are more at home in this intricately constructed milieu than others.  John Hawkes pulls off every second he’s on screen. Even when delivering outrageous lines that seem impossibly weighed down with metacommentary, he never hits a false note or comes across as unsure or self-conscious.  It’s yet another amazing turn in the distinguished career of this underappreciated actor.

Beyond its players, content, design, and shooting style, another significant factor sets Too Late apart from any other contemporary neo-noir namely, its unusual rollout. Hauck’s and his distribution company have opted to release the film only in 35mm, drastically curbing the number of theaters that can show it. In the era of Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Simultaneous Video On Demand release dates, it’s a bold risk to restrict a movie’s initial audience in such an extreme way. But it is a savvy calculation, as this picture plays heavily on its cinephile bona fides and its unabashed reverence for films and for film. It may well get a lot more attention paid to it because of this unique rollout to the few theaters still projecting celluloid than it would if released in the traditional way of most modern indies—running for a week in a handful of theaters in the hopes of boosting VOD visibility. (Indeed I’m devoting a lot more ink to it than I normally might have.) 

Unlike Pulp Fiction and the few decent imitators that followed, Too Late does not add up to more than the sum of its parts. The mystery and the central gimmick grow less and less compelling as we near the final reel.  While we’re eventually able to put all the pieces together, the resulting completed puzzle doesn’t feel all that satisfying. Too Late falls into the category of a movie built around a clever production stunt rather than a compelling narrative. Still, if it never fully transcends its cinematic conceit, it is undeniably impressive and enjoyable to watch. This eye-catching début should make any film fan eager to see what Hauck does next.