Review: Oliver Stone-Produced Wild Palms Miniseries on Kino Blu-ray

The miniseries exists somewhere beyond the boundaries of normal taste, in a realm where sheer muchness is its own reward.

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Wild Palms BRRarely has a series so purely distilled its essence into a single image as Wild Palms does. In the semi-infamous opening scene of the first episode of this overstuffed five-hour event series, hotshot patent attorney Harry Wyckoff (Jim Belushi) suddenly awakes and walks outside in his underwear to discover a rhinoceros standing in his empty in-ground swimming pool. Upon seeing the animal, Wyckoff solemnly intones, “So this is how it begins.” With this deeply goofy yet oddly haunting image, Wild Palms announces itself as a work of grand-operatic camp, a clumsy yet entertaining attempt to cram as many weird and wacky ideas into one series as the constraints of early-’90s network television will possibly allow.

Wild Palms first aired a couple years after the cancellation of Twin Peaks, and it was an obvious attempt by ABC to recapture some of the off-beat magic of David Lynch and Mark Frosts’s series. The opening credits, with those slowly swaying palm trees set to Ryuichi Sakamoto’s ominous synth theme, practically announce the series as Twin Peaks: Los Angeles, but the atmosphere here is far loonier and the plotting much denser than in Twin Peaks. Wild Palms was widely promoted on the basis of Oliver Stone’s involvement as executive producer, and its narrative reflects the controversial filmmaker’s penchant for vast conspiracies that resolve themselves in almost Shakespearean fashion.

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But while Lynch and Stone’s influence on Wild Palms is undeniable, the series is very much the work of novelist Bruce Wagner, who wrote all five episodes, served as executive producer alongside Stone, and, according to his audio commentary on this Blu-ray, even filmed the opening credits. As in his screenplay for Maps to the Stars, Wagner attempts to meld bitter Hollywood satire with whacked-out science fiction, and with decidedly mixed results.

The series’s convoluted plot revolves around a right-wing political faction known as the Fathers, led by Senator Tony Kreutzer (Robert Loggia), a messianic leader who heads up a powerful Scientology-like cult known as the Church of Synthiotics and also runs a TV network, Channel 3. Meanwhile, an insurgent group called the Friends is attempting to challenge the Fathers’s power with underground resistance tactics. Harry Wyckoff, a family-man attorney married to fashion boutique owner Grace (Dana Delaney) is one day visited by an old flame, Paige Katz (Kim Cattrall), who asks him to track down her missing son, while also drawing him close into the inner circle of the Fathers, with whom she’s closely associated.

It’s all set in the then-future of 2007, where men inexplicably dress in ill-fitting Edwardian suits and everybody drives around in vintage 1950s automobiles. Society is teetering on the brink of collapse, and Channel 3 is debuting a new virtual reality system called Mimecom that allows viewers to beam realistic holograms directly into their living rooms. This being an ostensibly scathing Hollywood satire, the first application of Mimecom is, of course, a tacky sitcom, one that happens to star Harry’s son, Coty (Ben Savage), and a famous actress, Tabba Schwartzkopf (Bebe Neuwirth), who’s a high-level member of the Church of Synthiotics.

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The large cast of characters form a dense web of interconnections, but keeping track of who’s related to whom and how becomes increasingly tedious as the series wears on. Similarly, Wild Palms keeps piling on various half-baked sci-fi concepts and conspiracies until it begins to feel like the point of the whole thing is to overwhelm audiences with its sheer too-much-ness. And around the midpoint of the series, this effort to flood our senses with as many disturbing details and spooky connections as possible starts to feel strangely exciting, as if Wagner were presciently recreating the environment of total information overload we all live in today.

Unfortunately, however, these various strands and connections all eventually lead to the same tired narrative dead end: a simplistic good-versus-evil struggle between the freedom-fighting Friends and the techno-fascistic Fathers. Aside from Wagner’s mordant swipes at Scientology—including a running parody of the Church’s paramilitary-like Sea Org—the two sides of this battle are too vaguely defined to have much political bite. If Wild Palms has one truly resonant idea, it’s its vision of a future in which politics, entertainment, religion, and even drugs have become merely different arms of the same ruling elite.

But Wild Palms is mostly enjoyable not for what it says, but for how it says it. Its jabs at the vacuity of La La Land may be pretty trite, its politics simplistic, and its vision of the future sorely dated and incoherent, but you may find yourself admiring the alacrity with which the series serves up some indelibly gonzo images. Where else can one see a woman with a full-back tattoo of a palm tree transform into Robert Loggia barking like a dog? Or see a washed-up lounge singer played by Robert Morse get killed by his hologram when it shoves its entire arm down his throat? And if the series’s constant stream of references can be exhausting, at least they’re admirably arcane, from The Prisoner to Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon to The Woman in the Dunes. William Gibson, whose work exerts a huge influence over the series’s sci-fi elements, even gets a cameo as himself. When introduced as the man who coined the word “cyberspace,” he wearily replies, “And they won’t let me forget it.”

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Wild Palms also affords the opportunity to see an impressive assortment of stars—about half of whom are woefully miscast—give a dizzying array of clashing, off-tempo performances. Cattrall looks completely lost, trying to vamp it up as noirish femme fatale. Belushi doesn’t even try to blend into the film’s surreal future milieu, playing the role of a high-powered attorney turned resistance leader with the same sluggish average-joe shtick he brought to eight seasons of According to Jim. Savage is bizarrely miscast in a menacing, Damien-like role, bringing a cute-kid innocuousness even to a scene in which Coty cuts out a man’s tongue. Loggia at least seems to be having a good time hamming it up, treating every scene as if it were some high-toned Greek tragedy like Oedipus Rex. There are also a few finely calibrated performances, especially from Angie Dickinson as Grace’s über-bitch mother and Delaney, who brings a human warmth to her role that’s otherwise totally missing from the series.

And the discordance of the acting is exacerbated by the direction. With four different directors over five episodes, the series never really establishes a unique identity, ping-ponging between hypnotic Steadicam shots and jittery action. Keith Gordon, who directed the second and fourth episodes, gets on the wavelength of Wagner’s script, with languorous long takes and lightly showy 360-degree pans, and Kathryn Bigelow, who helmed the third episode, squeezes in a fairly taut action sequence set to the Animals’s “House of the Rising Sun.” But the first and last episodes, directed by Peter Hewitt and Phil Joanou, respectively, are often garish and hyperbolic, with little feel for the playful, yet never overtly jokey, tone of the material.

Ultimately, Wild Palms is little more than a curiosity, but in this age of slick, tasteful shows in which tone is tightly managed and narrative is carefully doled out over the course of 10-plus hours per season, it’s refreshing to see a series so recklessly pack as much oddball humor, random violence, nutty sociology, paranoid conspiracism, and obscure cultural references into each episode as it can possibly stand. Like other maximalist, satirical whatchamacallits like Southland Tales and Brewster McCloud, it exists somewhere beyond the boundaries of normal taste, in a realm where sheer muchness is its own reward.

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Image/Sound

Wild Palms receives a crisp new 2K remaster from that allows its sun-drenched imagery to really pop in ways that it never has. The colors are lively and vivid, and all those roving Steadicam shots bear no traces of the choppiness that sometimes dogs lower-quality transfers. The sound design is relatively uncomplicated, but the audio elements are still nicely balanced here, with Ryuichi Sakamoto’s dramatic synth score coming through very clearly, even when playing under dialogue, and the scattered classic-rock needle drops have a lively, bass-rich punch. Bizarrely, though, the image quality of all scenes with on-screen text—including the opening credits and subtitled scenes—is noticeably degraded, so much so that at one point this strikingly consistent deficiency in the transfer even constitutes a mild spoiler when, in a scene in which a character speaks on the phone, we know he will start speaking Japanese.

Extras

All five episodes feature newly recorded audio commentary tracks—so new, in fact, that one participant even references COVID-19—and their wildly varying quality is fitting for a series of such chaotic highs and lows. Bruce Wagner and Jim Belushi provide chummy though halting conversation over the first episode, suggesting two old buddies who haven’t seen each other in a while only to quickly discover that they don’t have very much to talk about. On the commentary accompanying the third episode, Dana Delaney mostly focuses her attention on Wild Palms’s strange costumes, makeup, and hairdressing, while Wagner sets his sights mostly on Delaney’s looks. Belushi recalls his experience fondly, though it’s clear he didn’t really understand what the hell was going on, a condition that was endemic among the actors according to several of the commentaries. Wagner seems slightly embarrassed by the series, and it’s clear he hasn’t revisited it in quite a while. Early in his commentary for the first episode, he seems even to have half-forgotten that the series was set in the future. The second and fourth episodes feature intelligent technical notes from director Keith Gordon, the one person in the production who seems to have fully understood the project. But the spirit of the series is perhaps best captured by director Phil Joanou, who expresses love and admiration for the cast and complete bafflement at the rest of the production, complaining frequently about the fact that he was tasked with directing the dramatic climax without having seen any of the rest of the series. Joanou sums up the feelings of so many who’ve experienced Wild Palms when he admits early in his commentary: “I was pretty confused by it.”

Overall

With a mostly sparkling yet obviously flawed transfer and inconsistent audio commentaries, Kino Lorber’s Wild Palms release is every bit as erratic as the series itself.

Score: 
 Cast: Jim Belushi, Dana Delany, Robert Loggia, Kim Cattrall, Angie Dickinson, Ernie Hudson, Bebe Neuwirth, Nick Mancuso, David Warner, Ben Savage, Bob Gunton, Aaron Michael Metchik, Robert Morse, Brad Dourif, Charles Rocket, François Chau, Beata Pozniak  Director: Keith Gordon, Kathryn Bigelow, Peter Hewitt, Phil Joanou  Screenwriter: Bruce Wagner  Distributor: KL Studio Classics  Running Time: 286 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1993  Release Date: June 30, 2020  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Keith Watson

Keith Watson is the proprietor of the Arkadin Cinema and Bar in St. Louis, Missouri.

1 Comment

  1. It’s funny how in 2023 we know now it was actually the left-wing that wanted to, and did, dominate our media, and seek to silence everyone who opposed them. So much for Hollywood’s longstanding grudge against the right, eh?

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