Mulholland Drive

TIFF [2001]

Full size poster

(USA/France, 2001, 146 minutes)
Written and Directed by David Lynch
Cast: Justin Theroux, Naomi Watts, Laura Elena Harring, Ann Miller, Robert Forster, Dan Hedaya

Movie Review

Those who thought that David Lynch's G-rated "The Straight Story" marked a drastic U-turn in his artistic sensibility will either be delighted, or appalled, by his return to the noir-tinged dreamscape of "Blue Velvet" and "Twin Peaks" with the mystifying and often infuriating "Mulholland Drive". It's easy to go for the glib statement with too much caffeine and too little time, but this one makes "Lost Highway" look downright coherent in retrospect.

Expanded from a rejected series pilot for ABC (why, for the love of God, hire someone like David Lynch and then complain that it's too weird?), the movie "Mulholland Drive" often seems engineered to deliberately task the viewer's patience. Ostensibly, it's about the relationship between voluptuous brunette "Rita" (or is it Diane?) with amnesia (after surviving an assassination attempt and a car wreck on the titular street) who attempts to reconstruct her identity with the help of Betty, a naive starlet from Deep River, Ontario. It's also about a triple murder, a director on the run from mob-like financiers, a dream about a diner, and a homeless man with a strange blue box.

Stars Naomi Watts & Laura Elena Harring

Writer/Director David Lynch

At two-and-a-quarter hours, the "Mulholland Drive" is overlong, but far from boring -- Lynch piles on the unexpected cameos (Chad Everett, Ann Miller, Lee Grant, even Billy Ray Cyrus), brutal violence, explicit sex and nudity, and mock-camp dialogue (detectives Robert Forster and Brent Briscoe could've stepped off the set of "Hawaiian Eye"), and is obviously having a grand old time unleashing various degrading horrors on his characters as they struggle with another Byzantine mystery. As with DePalma and "Raising Cain", Lynch also seems to be deconstructing (or is he shamelessly raiding?) his own filmography: eerie musical interludes ala "Eraserhead", the Nancy Drew dares of "Blue Velvet" (there's even a "Roy Orbison" moment), the constantly expanding freakish ensemble of "Wild At Heart", the dwarf of "Twin Peaks" (here a studio mogul, in an office that resembles "The Black Lodge"), and mostly, the doppleganger/identity switch headscratcher of "Lost Highway".

Talk Back

David Lynch fans will warm to the familiar supernatural phantoms (an albino cowboy here), kitschy, dimly-lit interiors, nerve-wracking sound montages, and collision of contemporary and period elements (the film opens with a sock hop, but is clearly set in the present), shot in glorious widescreen and driven by another haunting ambient score from Angelo Badalementi (who also costars as an underworld financier). Others will count the minutes until bolting for the exit (as did many during the press screening -- cowards...).

Many will balk at this, but I have never found David Lynch to be pretentious. From his downhome persona in interviews, and from the many genre elements and homages evident in his now-twenty-five-year body of work, I'm as convinced as ever that he just sees the world in a decidedly "different way". I'm sure that in his mind, his stories are as commercial as Dean Koontz novels, chock full of ghosts, murders, conspiracies, femme fatales, profanity-spewing crooks, whodunits, even old-fashioned romance. It's just that because Lynch's background is in avant-garde painting and experimental film, the stories eventually come out, well....odd. As a long-time Lynch aficionado, I enjoyed his latest fever-dream purely on the basis of style and copious cheap thrills, even as I felt he was pulling my leg the whole time.

- Robert L

Talk Back