TRACK 29
With Theresa Russell, Gary Oldman, Christopher Lloyd, Colleen Camp, Sandra Bernhard, and Seymour Cassel.
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The problem with that kind of thinking is that it commits the same error commonly seized upon by producers: it assumes that creating a work of art is a matter of following certain recipes. In point of fact, Track 29 is not totally devoid of the virtues promised by the collaboration of Potter and Roeg on an American subject, but it is not a simple matter of addition and multiplication, either: Potter plus Roeg times America doesn’t equal exactly what you’d expect, because each of them tends to cancel out portions of the others. If a formula of some sort is needed, Roeg versus Potter versus America may actually come closer to the mark.
What there is of an objective plot and setting is remarkably slender. It concerns the unhappy marriage of Dr. Henry Henry (Christopher Lloyd) and Linda Henry (Theresa Russell), who live in a small town in North Carolina. The husband, obsessed with his model trains, contemptuous of Linda’s drinking, and sexually indifferent to her, grows increasingly neglectful of his work at a geriatric hospital, where his principal interest is his mistress Nurse Stein (Sandra Bernhard), a dominatrix who spanks him with rubber gloves to the strains of bombastic classical music,
Luc Sante has defined two traits in Dennis Potter’s work, “a neurotic obsessiveness that is transmuted into rhythm, and a penchant for dreams”–traits that “join in the faculty of memory” (and can be found in Dreamchild as well as Pennies From Heaven and The Singing Detective). The same traits are common to Roeg’s work, and the curious results in Track 29 are roughly akin to Mondrian’s White on White. The neurotic hang-ups of both Henry and Linda converge in a broad portrait of American regression and infantilism; it’s a portrait supported by everything from Henry’s model trains and his desire to be spanked to Linda’s collection of dolls and the braces on her teeth, and it is given even more direct expression by Martin’s infantile behavior (including his polymorphous perversity). But the satirical thrust of this portrait is considerably weakened by many behavioral details that appear throughout the film.
The ironic uses that Potter makes of popular songs in Pennies From Heaven and The Singing Detective are invariably grounded in social and psychological meanings, so it seems significant that he’s only allowed one such foray here–Oldman’s rendition of “Mother” at a piano. Like Russell, Lloyd, and Bernhard, Potter seems constrained here in a context where only the stylistic gymnastics of Roeg and Oldman–freed as they are from the contours of a particular reality–are able to shine.
