Mojave

This has been a good month for moviegoers craving celebrations of machismo. First, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s desperately masculine, Oscar-nominated The Revenant went wide. Then, Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi opened and fizzled in the same weekend. Now, The Departed screenwriter William Monahan’s second directorial effort, Mojave, joins the fray with a naked reverence for manly men peddling their manliness in the movie biz. The film lacks the brazen dick-swinging of 13 Hours and the bravura craftsmanship of The Revenant, but Monahan is something neither Bay nor Iñárritu aspire to be: He’s honest, and his movie is honest by consequence.
It should be immediately noted that Mojave is made neither better nor worse for Monahan’s sincerity as a writer and a director, but it does make the film more interesting. Monahan puts his macho inclinations right up front and refuses to disguise them, even as they start to decline into ego-driven self-portraiture. Mojave’s hero is Tom (Garrett Hedlund), a writer-director like Monahan who lives his life according to every bad boy artist stereotype you can rattle off on one hand: His style is best described as scruffy, he speaks primarily in grunts, he drinks like a fish, he ignores all of his phone calls, and he goes off on jaunts into the titular desert for no discernible reason other than to find himself by indulging his ennui and his tough guy reveries. Basically, he’s kind of an asshole.
On one such trek into the Mojave, he wrecks his jeep and attempts to make his way home on foot. But as he rests by his campfire one night, he’s approached by a drifter, Jack (Oscar Isaac), who looks like Jack Sparrow and Carl McCoy’s lovechild, sounds like The Simpsons’ Fat Tony doing Clint Eastwood, and pretends to be the Devil. He’s clearly bad news, but Tom engages his eccentric guest in philosophical digressions about selfhood, government and Moby Dick; when Jack overstays his welcome, Tom draws on the survival skills he has cultivated from years of living in Hollywood, knocks Jack out, and summarily abandons him in the wild. (So maybe the film is more like The Revenant than meets the eye.) On the journey home, he also kills a park ranger by accident per the demands of Anton Chekhov.