Mojave

For about the first twenty minutes of director William Monahan’s 2015 film, Mojave, an ascetic hand is at work in laying out the mise-en-scène and inciting incident of his self-written script. It all begins with a video clip of protagonist Tom, leaning back in a chair and smoking a cigarette. We learn that he has been famous for most of his life, the nature of his celebrity a question (the answer, though made clear later, is perhaps inapropos, if we allow that Tom, in his own way, is a cipher), and that he is bored with his life to the point of suicidal insouciance. Insouciance, as it were, at once a term a duo of emulous characters in this film would discuss for hours in a Metaphysica drama. Monahan shoots, in the opening minutes that follow the video clip, what must have been a stack of nearly blank pages, capturing […]

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