(Xenon Pictures)
Xenon Pictures, 2021. Drama. 90 min.
Grade: 3 out of 4
Tony Todd has scared us onscreen so many times, be at as Candyman, Death, or Worf’s less honorable Klingon brother, that it’s a switch-up to see him as the scared one. Reteamed with his original Candyman director Bernard Rose in Traveling Light, he plays Caddy, a seemingly quite well-off Los Angeles man who has decided, right as COVID is spiking for the first time and the George Floyd-related riots are beginning, to give rideshare driving a go. He has one of the best facemasks money could buy in those early days of 2020, and an ulterior motive – his mentally ill son is living on the streets somewhere, and Caddy would like to find him and ensure his safety. And Todd speaks in a normal voice, which makes clear just how much he’s been doing a “monster” one in so many prior films.
None of his fares wants to go anywhere near skid row, though. Instead, he frequently finds himself ferrying people back and forth from a swanky Mulholland Drive hilltop abode playing host to an online yoga guru (Danny Huston) who’s more than a little cult leader-y in person. Notable among the attendees are Todd (Stephen Dorff), a celebrity attempting sobriety; and Arthur (Matthew Jacobs), a stalkery obsessive who likes to surreptitiously film and/or call the law on people not observing proper social distancing.
With saturated colors that make L.A. look greener and in more bloom than it ever actually is, and periodic uses of slo-mo and dissolves, Rose (no director of photography is credited) gives the proceedings a fever dream feeling that’s appropriate to the literal fevers of the time. When much of the city locked itself inside, rare departures from home took on a surreal quality that’s captured here. Via Caddy, we travel back and forth between the swankiest houses of the wealthy and the street-level realities, including an aside at L.A. Thai food fixture Jitlada, in which characters who seem like they might be the real-life employees discuss their impending fears of shutdown. Meanwhile, the privileged buy into any and every excuse to party, sucking down snake oil shots probably spiked with the substances they’re supposed to be rehabbing from, in the name of spirituality.
After establishing Caddy and his goal, the movie takes a long departure from him, focusing instead on the party, and Arthur’s attempt first to bust in, and later to fit in…then to bust it again once its juju has worn off on him. Just as the privilege of all these people manages to filter out any concerns they might have for the larger world, their storyline starts to crowd out Caddy’s more important needs and journey. If this is deliberate metaphor, it’s pretty savvy, as if to show that even the plot has white privilege.
Movies, for the most part, have been determined not to show us the pandemic at all, to the point that future generations may look back and think those of us who lived through it were lying about masking, because nobody much does it onscreen. It’s refreshing to see one that depicts it, and the excuses people make not to wear the masks, but it also has a few issues in depicting the pro-mask side. Characters so in favor of them that they’ll chew out others, or even try to get them in trouble, can later be seen without them for no good reason, or with them far too loose, or generally ignoring their own stated boundaries.
At one point, Arthur weighs the odds and decides it’s worth a COVID risk to have a beautiful blonde hug him. Fair. But after we’ve seen Caddy absolutely ream an arrogant Karen over her dismissal of his concerns, this driver with the best mask available later drives home an obviously wasted guru, in the front seat, with neither covering their faces? Okay, sure, we as viewers might want to see Tony Todd and Danny Huston do a scene together showing the full range of facial expressions. But it doesn’t fit the character. Take it from a guy who still masks in public, and is waiting for vaccine shot #6. Those of us who treat this seriously…treat it seriously.
Rose’s popular apex as a director may have come in the mid-’90s, with Candyman, Immortal Beloved, and Anna Karenina, but he’s been steadily making films ever since, even if the last one you’re likely to have heard much about was Ivans xtc in 2000. Pivoting between horror movies with titles like Snuff-Movie and SX_Tape, and artsier aspirations like the drug smuggler biopic Mr. Nice and the classical semi-biopic The Devil’s Violinist, he’s never made one quite like Traveling Light, which feels like the sort of movie Henry Jaglom might have made about COVID in L.A. if he had a more experimental cinematographer, and didn’t completely suck these days. It’s the kind of oddly noncommercial drama usually made by first-time filmmakers with few resources, maximizing their hometown and the actors they know personally for all they’re worth. Except that when Rose calls in favors from friends to do such a thing, he gets people like his longtime collaborators Todd, Huston, and Olivia d’Abo.
The title has multiple possible meanings – Caddy, of course, is a source of goodness and light, who travels. Many of the spoiled people he runs into, however, are light on information or intelligence, and attempting to spiritually or sensually travel anyway. Nobody’s without baggage, at least of the emotional sort, except perhaps Caddy’s elusive son, who ran away from all of his. Meanwhile, the light from the protest riots travels across the city and the nation.
Traveling Light would hardly be the first movie to depict Los Angeles as stratified, with the wealthy looking down on the city from the hills, and the street-level folks struggling to survive. It’s one of the first to attempt to do so through the filter of the current pandemic that people like to pretend is over now, and even though it doesn’t get the masking thing quite right, it brings home the way shared crisis really doesn’t change things or bring people together as much as we’d like to think.
Just as life itself has done these last three years.