Film Review: 'Track 29'

Nicolas Roeg's 1988 psychological thriller boasts Theresa Russell, Gary Oldman, Christopher Lloyd, and Sandra Bernhard and is a good representation of the vision of George Harrison’s HandMade Films

Jan 12, 2024

Theresa Russell and Gary Oldman in ‘Track 29’

Track 29: Directed by Nicolas Roeg. Starring Theresa Russell, Gary Oldman, Christopher Lloyd, Sandra Bernhard. Currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.

(HUDSON, N.Y., January 10, 2024) - Track 29, the 1988 psychological thriller combined with black comedy, is a kind of modern-day retelling of the Oedipus myth. The movie was produced by HandMade Films at the apex of its 15-year existence, after a decade-long series of mostly offbeat English films that anticipated the explosion of the indie cinema movement in America in the 1990s.

HandMade was an outgrowth of a last-ditch effort by former Beatle George Harrison to help finance the kryptonite-like comedy, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, a spoof of religion and Biblical epics made by Harrison friends Eric Idle and the rest of the Monty Python’s Flying Circus crew. With financing withdrawn by EMI Films at the very last minute, Harrison came to the rescue, taking out a second mortgage on his beloved castle of a home, Friar Park, to fund the completion, release, marketing and distribution of the movie. It turned out to be a successful bet for Harrison, grossing over $21 million in the US alone (one of Harrison’s only such financial successes in a career marked by financial disasters of epic proportions, even amidst the millions he earned in royalties from his years with the Beatles and several monster solo hits in the 1970s).

Harrison and his business partner Denis O’Brien went on to form HandMade Films, which has been credited with rescuing the moribund British film industry of the 1980s with a series of critical and financial successes, as well as launching or re-launching the careers of such actors as Bob Hoskins (Mona Lisa, The Long Good Friday), Michael Caine (Mona Lisa), Maggie Smith (The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, A Private Function, The Missionary), and Helen Mirren (The Long Good Friday) and providing work for up-until-then unheralded writers, directors, and other film artists for over a decade, until the utopian effort, like the Beatles’ Apple before it, crashed and burned, in this case due to Denis O’Brien having used the company’s profits – meaning George Harrison’s bank account -- as a personal credit card, nearly bankrupting Harrison along the way and once again jeopardizing his ownership of Friar Park.

All of this is somewhat beside the point of enjoying Track 29 on its own merits, although it might help to explain why a large wall poster of Harrison can be seen in a flashback of a teenager’s bedroom, and perhaps why the movie opens to the sounds of John Lennon singing his very appropriate Oedipal primal-scream tune, “Mother.” (Lennon was long dead by the time the film was made, but presumably Harrison’s connections to the late Beatle didn’t hurt in gaining permission to license the number for use in the movie.)

Track 29 is not a great film, but it is a fascinating film nonetheless and one worth watching, if only for seeing a very young and pretty Gary Oldman, who has been foremost in our minds as of late for his lead role as a pretty old and very not-pretty Jackson Lamb in the MI5 comic drama Slow Horses on AppleTV+. Whereas Oldman as Lamb is slovenly to the point of disgusting – you can practically smell the odor of his long, stringy, greasy hair, the reek of tobacco and alcohol, and the flatulence he wields as a well-timed weapon for getting rid of those for whom he has no more patience – here we find Oldman as something of an ingenue.

This wasn’t his first major role – it follows up his breakthrough portrayal of Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy – but it helped to temper his style and showed him capable of remarkable range. Not that he is all sweetness and light in Track 29; he is an ominous figure, someone from Theresa Russell’s past come to claim his birthright, so to speak. Or maybe he is not even there – the movie is open to the possibility that Oldman’s character is merely the age-old wish-fullfillment of Linda Henry’s (Theresa Russell) stultifyingly boring life, stuck in a loveless marriage to Henry Henry (Christopher Lloyd), a doctor who spends all his spare time in his attic playing with his elaborate model train set -- that is, when he’s not shtupping his nurse on the side, played by an incredibly alluring Sandra Bernhard, she of the impossibly wide and expressive mouth.

Gary Oldman and Theresa Russell in ‘Track 29’

By the time director Nicolas Roeg (aka Mr. Theresa Russell) made Track 29, he already had peaked with triumphs including Don’t Look Now and The Man Who Fell to Earth. Those familiar with Roeg’s cinematic vision will find much to recognize, if not to love, here. Interestingly enough, Roeg pays tribute to Richard Lester – the man behind the camera for the Beatles’ comedies A Hard Day’s Night and Help! – as one of his main influences, and a generation of indie film directors, including Steven Soderbergh, Christopher Nolan, and Danny Boyle look to Roeg as their hero. (Boyle even went so far as to make his own Beatles-centric movie, Yesterday, in 2019.)

As much as Track 29 is blessed with Roeg’s adventurousness and his fascination with alienation, and as much as he presents Theresa Russell at her best in a demanding, almost-impossible-to-play-straight role, the film today is betrayed by an undertow of violent misogyny (credit film critic Roger Ebert for picking up on that back in the day). Although made in 1988, the film has the overall feel of 1978 or even 1968 in its anarchic spirit and its lack of subtlety, which is perhaps why it never found purchase with an audience upon release or since.

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But the Criterion Channel is featuring a large array of movies produced by HandMade Films this month (and hopefully for months to come) and Track 29 certainly makes its own strong case as an overlooked gem, if something less than a truly great film.

Among the 18 HandMade Films movies currently streaming on the Criterion Channel are Time Bandits, Mona Lisa, The Long Good Friday, Withnail and I, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Bullshot, Five Corners, Privates on Parade, Scrubbers, and A Private Function.

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