The title “Saint John of Las Vegas” is an odd phrase: Vegas is as much a place for saints as Disneyland is for college students. But as intriguing as it may seem, it turns out just to be a bad title. “Saint John of Las Vegas” is not about sainthood, even ironically, or really about Vegas, though admittedly the main character is named John.
John works for an auto insurance company in New Mexico, and he’s played by Steve Buscemi, which tells us everything the title couldn’t. Buscemi is an unavoidably distinctive-looking actor, something like a shriveled, perpetually frightened descendent of Peter Lorre. John, then, will inevitably be a pathetic yet endearing character ““ he’ll be quirky, and sometimes he’ll be slightly annoying. His connection to Las Vegas is forced into the movie by an opening voice-over, which explains that John used to live in the city, that he had a lot of luck there, and that most of that luck was bad. He is soon sent somewhere near Vegas to investigate a car accident claim with Virgil (Romany Malco) from the company’s fraud detection department.
If that last name sounds familiar, you’re on the right track ““ when Dante visited the nine circles of hell in his “Inferno,” it was the poet Virgil who guided him. This explains why, in this film, John’s last name is Alighieri, which was Dante’s as well. This all means, presumably, that John and Virgil’s journey to Vegas will take them through a modern approximation of hell.
It’s a weak parallel ““ there’s no logical reason for John to go along for this particular ride, or for Virgil and him to encounter a nudist colony, or for John Cho to appear briefly as a sideshow act who bursts uncontrollably into flames. John and Virgil’s trip becomes an exercise in episodic weirdness, echoing such films as “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” or any of Wes Anderson’s live-action films.
But whereas the Coen brothers sought modern insight into the Odyssey, and Anderson was at least trying to probe the dark corners of the human psyche, rookie writer-director Hue Rhodes appears to lack a sense of purpose with “Saint John.” The connections between his script and Dante’s “Inferno” are tenuous, as if Rhodes found himself torn between the contrivance of allegory and an irrepressible desire for audiences to accept his characters as real.
At his desk job in New Mexico, John had formed a kind of friendship with Jill (Sarah Silverman), who occupies the next cubicle and whose entire personality can be summarized by her obsession with smiley faces. Just before John leaves with Virgil, he and Jill steal off to the women’s bathroom to capitalize on the sexual energy that presumably existed somewhere off-screen. And for the rest of the film, Jill calls regularly to fawn over her new lover. We have a word for this kind of relationship in the real world: imaginary.
Just at the end of “Saint John,” though, when the impulse to look for symbolic meaning is strongest, John offers up another voice-over: he’s realized that he doesn’t need luck, which makes him the luckiest person alive. Such blatant moralizing would fit well enough into a Disney cartoon, but after an hour and a half of strippers, circuses and nudists, it’s haltingly incongruous. If this film were a jigsaw puzzle, Rhodes would have grabbed pieces out of several different boxes, painted them with Day-Glo and jammed them together.
It should be said, though, that the deadbeat casino towns on the outskirts of Vegas provide the perfect setting for “Saint John.” Film and location echo one another perfectly: strangeness reigns supreme, without meaning or consequence, while in nearby cinemas and cities there’s almost guaranteed to be some richer entertainment available. What happens somewhere outside Vegas should probably stay there.
““ Alex Goodman
E-mail Goodman at
agoodman@media.ucla.edu.