Lindsay Lohan in THE CANYONS (IFC Films)

In recent interviews, Paul Schrader has talked about the “death of cinema” in relation to his latest film, The Canyons, his first since Adam Resurrected. In particular, he mentioned how the latest generation of filmmakers—people in their late 20’s, early 30’s—don’t seem to care about movies very much even as they are making them. And this commentary gets put into The Canyons at certain points, namely in the opening credits where crumbling movie theaters are shown. And in one scene, Leslie Lohan’s Tara asks a friend straight out, “How much do you go to the movies now, to see something that you actually wanted to see?” Frankly, Schrader’s own commentary is much, much more fascinating than anything he or writer Brett Easton Ellis have offered in their own movie.

It’s another in a long line of fictions from Mr. Ellis meant to be a (satirical?) take on vapid, narcissistic, probably violent and certainly misogynistic people. James Deen plays a dead-eyed film produced named Christian (or maybe Deen just has the dead eyes). His maniacal tendencies make life a hell for girlfriend Tara (Lohan) and the other people in his and her life, including his lover (Tenille Houston) and Tara’s lover, Ryan (Nolan Funk), who is also in the movie that is being made.

We don’t know much about this movie within the movie at all. Perhaps this is deliberate on Ellis and Schrader’s part. And perhaps The Canyons could have benefited from more visual satire. In only some moments do the filmmakers seem to know what is up with these preppy narcissists, like when two characters are on their cellphones during dinner with another couple, unaware that they’re being disrespectful, or when Tara uses a TV to do her texting. The rest of the movie is, how shall I say, a fiasco.

Well… let’s get the only real good news out of the way or the closest to it. Lohan, somehow, pulls out a good performance, at least as good as she can from the clichéd text Ellis has written. There’s something in this character, an actress on the skids who seems down about the movie business and has a messed up personal life, that I think must have appealed to Lohan on some gut level. She succeeds in being the best actor out of the lot, and she brings conviction with her lines, whether it’s a simple scene without emotion or one where she becomes hysterical.

Everyone else flat-out sucks, ranging from competent television-level acting (as in sub-par Lifetime movie acting) to abhorrent. And for the latter I look no further than James Deen. Did Schrader and company see actual talent or just the provocation of hiring a porn star for an independent film? I can’t speak to the quality of his day work, but here he’s a black hole of a personality, and it’s not that this character couldn’t have been brought to life—put James Franco in it, maybe he could’ve made it trashy but fun. Deen lacks any of the personality, skills, and charisma to make an over-the-top gnarly LA playboy worth watching for more than five minutes. It’s one of the worst performances by any actor in a non-student film I’ve come across.

But is it just the acting or the people at the helm? Maybe a combination. The drama just isn’t convincing the way Ellis has written it, but also Schrader tries to up the “style” with overlong tracking shots of nice looking but empty places, and his DP shoots scenes much too brightly to the point where everything has a bright sheen (again, a TV look). There is a way to make an artistically satisfying look at the moral deserts of the well-off—how else would Michelangelo Antonioni have his iconic status without his films of the ’60’s dealing with that—but Schrader, via Ellis’s occasionally campy and mostly dramatically dull script, doesn’t get there. He takes this material seriously, and surely he doesn’t skimp on the sex. But where is anything intellectually engaging, anything past what we could see on any episode of, say, MTV’s The Hills? Bottom line, if you stare into The Canyons, the canyons stare right back.