Track 29

Cast: Theresa Russell, Gary Oldman, and Christopher Lloyd

Director: Nicolas Roeg     

90 minutes (18) 1988

Powerhouse (Indicator)

Blu-ray region B

Rating: 8/10

Review by Donald Morefield   

“I remind you of someone, don’t I?” Based on his own British TV script, Dennis Potter seems to have written Track 29 as a US recycling effort, adjacent morally to David Lynch’s surrealist noir landscapes and so perhaps influenced by the critical success of Lynch’s breakthrough mystery Blue Velvet (1986). Here’s a North Carolina town where we find a frustrated housewife, Linda (Theresa Russell), unhappily married to a distracted doctor, Henry (Christopher Lloyd), until she meets creepily obsessive Englishman, Martin (Gary Oldman). Falling headlong into her desperately yearning fantasy of an escape from tiresomely domestic boredom, she soon comes to believe that this aggressively naughty ‘boy’ is actually her long-lost son (even though, in a preposterous but clearly intentional casting quirk, Oldman is only one year younger than Russell).

Meanwhile, down at the local clinic, Henry prefers the kinky attentions of nurse Stein (the typically sarcastic Sandra Bernhard), and plots to leave his nagging wife, whose musings lead to electrifyingly stylised fantasy sequences. This harshly delusional black-comedy is centred on the disturbed Linda’s languid eroticism and twitchily juvenile Martin’s wicked misbehaviours. Martin’s comment, that “Being a kid again, is as good an occupation as any,” is reflected later, quite satirically, in Henry’s grandstanding speech. Presented in showbiz terms much like an overblown political rally, he brashly entertains a meeting of adult enthusiasts caught up in their absurd passion for the all-consuming hobby of model trains. To his insistently needy wife, Henry eventually exclaims that “Women and trains don’t mix!”

Often garish and occasionally lewd, Track 29 is a colourfully campy romp with archly silly American melodramas of deeply festering loss and broody guilt, sketching out daydreams of oedipal lust and jealously homicidal rage. Its wryly offbeat sense of humour, exploring movie-making special effects and slow-motion action cinema, includes an orgy of model railway destruction (with thunderous sounds that mimic a real train wreck), some bloody slasher clichés, and fleeting illusions to up-end the demands of mystery genre concerns, and familiarly sensationalist Roeguish expectations. A big plus for this US-UK production by George Harrison’s HandMade Films, is the glorious cinematography by Alex Thomson (who also shot John Boorman’s Excalibur, Michael Cimino’s Year Of The Dragon, Ridley Scott’s Legend, and Roeg’s own Eureka), whose sharp camerawork enhances even the most prosaic scenes and prompts viewers to consider everything we see as a metaphor.  

On its first screening, Track 29 was arguably a picture lacking sophistication as its drama wallows in sudden twists and ‘frivolous’ visual tricks. However, with repeat viewings, the iconic director’s unrestrained cinematic imagination becomes rather more obvious and its dreamy aspects ultimately triumph, albeit quite brutally, over the limitations of any cruel reality. “What am I gonna do now?” It might still be viewed as a disappointment in the impressively creative oeuvre of Roeg. Or its dramas of violence in the pursuit of airhead ‘freedoms’ can be seen as yet another scathing critique of the increasingly depressing infantilisation of western cultures in general, and American lifestyles in particular.