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Review

In the spirit of the leading lights of the neo-noir genre, director Caruso’s debut alternates deliberately between the absurd comedy of drug culture and that culture’s attendant misery. But unlike, say, a Pulp Fiction or Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, The Salton Sea renders this duality explicitly, providing its protagonist (Kilmer) with two identities: Danny Parker, a speed junkie, and Tom Van Allen, a jazz trumpeter -- one propelled by vengeance, the other decidedly not propelled by anything. We meet a panoply of scumbags and losers, and it becomes clear that Caruso and writer Tony Gayton owe a great debt to the kind of "loserspeak" dialogue abundantly laced with pop culture references that Quentin Tarantino single-handedly made an indie trend in the 1990s. Its derivative comic antics notwithstanding, The Salton Sea hits its stride when Kilmer emotes a quiet desperation about the sorry hand he’s been dealt. If that seems like a familiar motif in noir cinema, that’s because it is. Indeed, the film’s success stems not from its innovation, but from its studied execution. From the opening scene, the audience can trace the downward spiral that is in store for Danny. The film’s pleasure lies in appreciating the craft of an effective genre study.

 -- Rich Zito