I’ll offer up my first buffalo nickel to anyone who is capable of making heads or tails of The Rambler. This is certainly one of the weirdest movies I’ve ever seen, and one of the most incoherent.
It’s not that the plot of The Rambler is difficult to follow – it isn’t. Nor are the characters even remotely difficult to keep track of; of course, that’s because most of them don’t even have proper names. The titular Rambler is simply known as The Rambler. There’s also The Scientist, The Girl, and The Driver. That’s makes it ultra-easy to keep track of who’s who, or at least it would if this was the kind of movie where losing track of who’s who is a legitimate fear. As it goes, though, we’re just following our lone man, The Rambler, through a manic, drug-binging version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I know – that is a phrase you probably NEVER thought you would see in print.
Dermot Mulroney is The Rambler. He’s been locked up for four years somewhere in the southwest and is being let out on good behavior for a crime writer/director Calvin Reeder declines to let us in on, this ramblin’ man tries to go back to his depraved lifestyle in a desert trailer park. Knowing that, one can probably guess what ensues for the next few scenes: The kind of condescending class contempt from Robert Altman movies that big time film critics inexplicably think is brilliant and wonderful. In quick succession, he first gets booted from home by his wife – knocked up, of course, because Altman-inspired characters are the scum of the Earth – and then from his job at the local pawn shop. After that, he gets a letter from his brother up in Oregon, offering him a job and a place to live.
The Robert Altman influence finally gets thrown out at this point, so Ramble does the final thing in this movie that will ever make sense: He sets off on a hitchhiking journey to Oregon. While the Altman characters disappear, though, the depravity is only beginning. The trip to the Pacific northwest is so full of hallucinogens that one would think The Rambler gorged on pot brownies made from cocaine bricks and washed them down with beer laced with liquid ecstasy. His first road encounter is with a weird “scientist” who is trying to get people to record their dreams on VHS tapes using a machine he rigged up with bootleg tools. I’ll spare the cliche about how it blows everyones’ minds and jut say outright: It makes heads explode like something out of the Evil Dead series.
Along the way, Rambly will find a girl with an odd attraction to him, step into a boxing ring, meet various monsters, get a ride with a cabbie obsessed with the movie Frankenstein , and have visions aplenty. Now, read that last sentence out loud. Did it sound coherent? If not, you can spare yourself a rental of The Rambler, because that’s exactly what watching it is like. At some point, Reeder apparently just decides to himself, “screw the structure!” The Rambler begins to unravel like Benicio Del Toro in the aforementioned Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
The Rambler, robbed of any narrative structure whatsoever soon into the movie, is thusly robbed of any real point as well. That makes it difficult to put any of the scenes into context, and without context, any impact the scenes are supposed to leave is lost. Therefore, there’s no feelings of emotion of thoughtful provocation. Well, I take that back: I think confusion is an emotion. If it’s not, I’m quite certain wanting to kill the director is. That’s mostly what I felt after the final scene, a nasty display of torture fetishism involving the cab driver who, by the way, mentions offhand that he’s a former paramedic with a fetish for injured women. I’ll spare the detail, but I assume you can figure out that his little quirk comes into play. The screaming in the scene runs a solid ten minutes. And don’t expect any clarification from a DVD feature of some sort, because The Rambler has no features. Just the movie, setup, and scene selection, and that’s it. I wouldn’t hold my breath for a Special Edition or a Director’s Cut of some sort, either, because The Rambler was only on a few screens; it was little more than a film festival flick.
The Rambler is little more than a series of vignettes which are weird for the sake of weird. There’s nothing in the end that ties all the drug visions together, and so we’re left with the sense of a cliffhanger.
The Rambler has earned a lot of comparisons to the work of David Lynch. As far as that goes, The Rambler is more Dune and less Mulholland Drive.