HE BLOWED UP AMERICA REAL GOOD..........GROUND ZERO AT "ZABRISKIE POINT"

Zabriskie Point (1970)   If you examine this movie with 49 years hindsight, there's no rational reason for its existence.......

                  How the hell did this even happen?   The ever-struggling MGM financing and producing an expansive 'Up Yours, America' from the Italian master of impenetrable alienation, Michaelangelo Antonioni??  Seriously?

                  Maybe not so crazy.........

                  By 1970, Hollywood finally premiered its responses to the chaos, deep division and domestic carnage that convulsed the U.S. still in the endless churn of the Vietnam War......

                   These included campus riot movies ("Getting Straight", "The Strawberry Statement", revisionist westerns ("Soldier Blue"), madness-of-war satires ("MASH", "Catch-22") even a dark, way-ahead-of-its-time harbinger of right-wing media stoking up Nixon's 'silent majority' ("WUSA").......

                   Even films with no overt political storylines were infected by the depressive dread of the era......the subtext: the Bad Guys run the country, they're getting away with murder and we're all screwed.......

                   In other words, nothing like controversy to goose the box-office tally.....

                  But none of these films quite generated the revulsion, anger and ridicule that swirled around "Zabriskie Point". After all, where did this pretentious auteur Antonioni get his nerve, using MGM cash to take a huge steaming dump on America?

                  So how's the film stand up, almost 50 years later?   Still a dopey mess, barely watchable.

                 For all his heralded talents, Antonioni's no different than a lot of 1970's Hollywood directors....... randomly pointing his camera at highway billboards and police cars to make his point....(look at all the rampant consumerism and government repression!!)

                  Never much of a storyteller, the director tracks the intersection of two young people (blank-faced, inexpressive non-actors Mark Frechette and Daria Halpin)  Frechette swipes a Piper Cub plane and flies off to the Southwest desert, since he may or may not have shot a cop during a campus protest........

                     Halpin's tooling around the same desert in an old 50's Buick, alienated from her....uh....ardent admirer,(Rod Taylor) a high-powered real estate tycoon planning to desecrate the landscape with golf course communities.......(he's never far from his coterie of aging, business-suited bigwigs...)

                     And there you have it. Halpin and Frechette hump away in the desert, along with other young couples who appear like magic. Frechette repaints his stolen plane into a colorful, hippie-dippy 'F*** You' to the Establishment.......the cops shoot him dead, but it's debatable for which crime - stealing the plane, killing a cop, or the plane's new counter-culture paint job.......(probably the latter, given the function of police in films like this....)

                     Then at at last Antonioni arrives at his signature set-piece......what appears as the only reason he went to the trouble of making the film in the first place......

                      After arriving at Rod Taylor's sumptuous, sprawling, ultra-modern house, carved into the Arizona desert, Halpin imagines the place blown to kingdom come......multiple times....from multiple angles. Antonioni treats us to a slow-motion ballet of American debris floating in the sky........(oh my God, a loaf of Wonder Bread blown to hell 'n gone...Oh, the humanity!)

                      Thus ended Antonioni's raised middle finger to America. And the makers of "Getting Straight", "WUSA" and such must have drooled with envy.......since "Zabriskie Point" sucked up all the outrage and hate  that they themselves could only dream of......

                     You'll have to decide if this 2 star (**) oddity is worth sitting through.......but by all means, do NOT miss a clip of the near-comatose Frechette and Halpin appearing on the Dick Cavett show to promote the film.......sitting along side Mel Brooks.  The disinterested 'actors' confound Cavett with monosyllable responses, while Brooks hilariously takes up the challenge of waking them up from whatever trance they're in. Priceless. 4 star (****) comedy.

                     If only Antonioni had cast Brooks in Rod Taylor's role.........