Down In The Valley has a serious demeanour and Ed Norton and that new car smell and everything, but don’t get all excited just yet. The film is also self-conscious about its own storytelling, and not in a good way.

Edward Norton is Harlan, a sweet-natured cowboy and a drifter who wanders the San Fernando valley. He’s working at a gas station when he meets the beautiful Tobe (Evan Rachel Wood) a teenager with a whim of iron and one incompetent parent.

Tobe invites Harlan to come with her to the beach, and so begins a passionate affair that’s strewn with hurdles. For one thing, Tobe’s father (David Morse) is a strict corrections officer and he doesn’t approve of Harlan.

For another, Harlan isn’t quite what he appears to be. He wants to be a cowboy and a stand-up guy, but there’s a bit of the delusional mixed in there. Even though he’s charming toward Tobe and her little brother (Rory Culkin), Harlan seems wound fairly tight. Indeed. Following Mr. Chekhov’s advice about first showing guns and then later firing them, Down In The Valley introduces dad’s extensive gun collection and allows a sense of impending doom to take over the picture.

Harlan’s adherence to the cowboy credo makes the first hour of Down In The Valley really engrossing. In the midst of urban blight and contemporary ennui, he’s a guy with standards and manners and even a bit of poetry in his heart. Too bad it’s all an invention in the end, a nostalgia for a time that never really existed. Like everything else in America, Harlan is just made up. As it happens, he and Tobe’s father are pretty much the same person — some guy with a gun who wants to be the hero.

The second half of Down In The Valley is a mess of unlikely events. Harlan begins to unravel, a process that entails much father-son psychological hooey, and there are scenes of gunplay designed to show you that we’re not nearly as far from the old Wild West as we’d all like to believe. There’s a movie within the movie, too, maybe to underline the surreal quality of reality in California. Whatever. By this point, the story has leapt from allegory to all gory and one longs for the end. So here it is: The End.

BOTTOM LINE: What you get for your money is one hour of new and interesting, with a complicated performance from Edward Norton, and one infuriating hour of lily-gilding and Serious Acting. Hey! Two movies in one! Not.

(This film is rated 18A)
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