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“Dead Souls” is the new movie directed by Alex Cox, which means that for the umpteenth time over the last four decades, the director of “Sid and Nancy” and “Repo Man” has made a movie that almost no one will see or care
about. Cox crowdfunded the film with a Kickstarter campaign, and it’s yet another of his arid didactic put-on Westerns. This one stars Cox himself as a mysterious and formidable old man in an undertaker’s suit and parson’s hat who wanders into an Arizona border town in 1890 to gather the names of dead Mexican laborers. “Dead Souls,” which is loosely based on the 1843 Nikolai Gogol novel of the same title, has kicked around at film festivals, and it premiered tonight at the Roxy Cinema, an off-the-beaten-track theater in New York. Is it a good movie? No, not really. But it’s one that inspires me to imagine — as every Alex Cox movie does — the glory of what might have been.
If I were asked to make a list of all the fantastic movie directors who never lived up to their promise, the No. 1 person on that list would be Alex Cox. This November, it will be 40 years since the release of “Sid and Nancy,” which I still think is one of the greatest movies ever made. It’s the greatest punk movie, the greatest music biopic, and a shattering and unexpectedly moving love story. The critic Terrence Rafferty described it as “‘A Hard Day’s Night’ in hell.” You could also call it “Romeo and Juliet” with knives and smack. It was Gary Oldman’s first film, and though he has never showed it much respect, I’m not kidding when I say that I think it’s still Oldman’s greatest performance — he brilliantly re-creates the sneering, self-mutilating, dumb-fuck surface of who Sid Vicious was, but he also gives him a teasing inner life that’s indelible. Chloe Webb’s performance as Nancy Spungen, the junkie girlfriend who Sid probably murdered (the role of Nancy was originally supposed to go to Courtney Love), is breathtaking in the nakedness of its emotion.
Prior to “Sid and Nancy,” Alex Cox, a Britisher born in Merseyside, had made just one film, “Repo Man” (1984), that exquisite punk comedy of L.A. disaffection. It became an instant cult classic, with lines of dialogue that loomed like koans over the ’80s (“The more you drive, the less intelligent you are,” “Ordinary fucking people. I hate ’em”). But as inspired in its absurdist nihilism as “Repo Man” was, there’s no way that anyone connected with his follow-up film, including the movie’s producer Eric Fellner, could have anticipated the raw humanity that Alex Cox would bring to “Sid and Nancy.”
The thing that always got me about “Sid and Nancy” — and I saw it probably 20 times in the ’80s — is that it was a total punk party, but in its rollicking way it was a work of classicism, made with a force of empathy that was undeniable. It wasn’t just hilarious; it was dead serious. It was true to the damaged wrecks Sid and Nancy were, yet it made them more complicated than you could have believed. The final scene, with Sid dancing with some kids around a boom box in a trash-strewn heaven, never failed to bring me to tears. Forget “Sex, Lies, and Videotape.” To me, the year that truly launched the independent-film revolution was 1986, the year of “Blue Velvet” and “Sid and Nancy.” I was dizzy with anticipation at what Alex Cox would do next.
He proceeded — figuratively — to shoot himself in the foot, the thigh, the gut, and the head. He self-destructed. But he did it almost on purpose, by directing movies that were more or less unreleasable. The year after “Sid and Nancy,” Cox went to Spain to make a low-budget satirical spaghetti Western that he wrote in three days called “Straight to Hell.” It starred Joe Strummer and Courtney Love and featured a roster of hip musicians (Shane MacGowan, Elvis Costello, Grace Jones), and it was a scrappy kitsch travesty of a movie that never pretended to be more than a throwaway. I thought, “Okay fine, that was something Alex Cox had to get out of his system.” (Kind of like when Steven Soderbergh, a decade later, cleaned his pipes by making “Schizopolis.”)
But later that same year, Cox released his big-budget studio follow-up, “Walker,” a historical Western about William Walker (played by Ed Harris), the American freebooter of the 1850s who led a mercenary army into the Nicaraguan civil war and wound up installing himself as the nation’s president. Western hubris? You bet, and Cox never let you forget it. The film was a left-wing Sunday-school lesson dressed up as…another tossed-together Cox neo-Western. “Walker” was a slovenly disaster. The film cost $6 million and grossed just $300,000. But it was a special kind of bomb. When “Sid and Nancy” was coming out, I interviewed Cox, talking to him in a Park Avenue hotel room, and while I liked him tremendously (he was funny, sharp, impassioned), I was struck by his unforgiving moralistic fervor, which he had already begun to aim like a howitzer at studio executives. He talked about them like they were the devil. When I saw “Walker” a year later, I put two and two together: The movie was an arch, sloppy, who-gives-a-fuck mess because Cox had made it that way deliberately. It was my feeling that on some level, consciously or unconsciously, his desire to fuck over the studio was so great that it led him to sabotage his own career.
Cox was done as a mainstream filmmaker. He moved to Mexico and settled down there, and after a while you heard that he was still making films. I was eager to see “Highway Patrolman,” his 1991 Spanish-language crime drama that was made down there, and at a certain point it was given a run at Film Forum in New York. The movie was…okay. (Not better than that.) You could tell that Cox was trying. But he’d lost the extraordinary creative juice that powered “Sid and Nancy” and “Repo Man.” And in my estimation, he has never gotten it back. He’s 71 now, and he’s still making sloppy absurdist “punk” japes, as if this was some sort of statement.
Tall, snarky, and hungry, with a wedge of stand-up hair, Cox, in the 1980s, styled himself as a provocateur; I recently saw a scrappy documentary on YouTube about the making of “Sid and Nancy,” and you could see what a hellion he was. But in “Dead Souls,” the fresh punk has become an aging specter. Cox still has that thick head of hair (now slicked back), as well as the prominent mole on his left cheek, but in “Dead Souls” he gives off a parched vibe as stately and wizened as that of William S. Burroughs. His character is named Strindler (we know that because he says it 100 times), and Cox gives him a voice of sinister politeness that evokes the John Huston of “Chinatown.” At first, as Strindler goes about his mission of gathering the names of the dead, we think he might be some sort of Mephistopheles figure, like Robert De Niro in “Angel Heart.” We wait to solve the mystery of what he’s after.
Cox shot the film in Almería, Spain (the picturesque backdrop for hundreds of spaghetti Westerns), as well as parts of Arizona, and there’s an inviting spaciousness to it. Yet the indoor scenes are dingy. Cox, working like a shoestring Peckinpah, sets up Strindler against the crooks who run the border town — the corrupt mayor and sheriff and a wealthy rancher. Strindler doesn’t know how to ride a horse or fire a gun (which is funny), and he climbs into a wagon operated by Borracho (Zander Schloss), the Wavy Gravy derelict who becomes his Sancho Panza. They ride off to visit an assortment of locals, with Strindler gathering names at each place for his book of the dead and paying for them. The drama is semi-playful in a static way.
But to what end? As we learn what Strindler is really up to (it’s no coincidence that his name rhymes with “swindler”), the film, like a one-man-band “There Will Be Blood,” becomes a lesson in cutthroat capitalism. How timely…and how tiresome. (We have the DSA for that, thank you.) The film starts as a mystery, but once that’s solved, the only real mystery is why Alex Cox tied his film career to a stone marked “retro Marxist Western punk pretension” and then threw that stone into the water and plunged down after it, sinking to the bottom.
What do I think he should have done otherwise? I think he should have grown up and recognized that making movies, because it involves so much money, requires compromise, and that all of the supreme filmmakers (except for maybe Orson Welles) understood that. If Cox had taken a different turn, who knows what amazing movies he might have given us? For two films, at least, he was a true artist. After that, you might say he stuck to his guns. Like Sid Vicious, he did it his way. He burned out and faded away. But I like to imagine an alternate universe in which Alex Cox continued to be the great filmmaker he was put on earth to be.
