October 11–18, 2001

movie shorts

Mulholland Dr.

by Sam Adams

What do you do when you run out of stories? With the notable exception of The Straight Story, David Lynch has been spinning variations on the same tale for the last 15 years, a story of corrupted innocence, forbidden temptations and the thin line that separates idyllic fantasy from bloody nightmare. Blue Velvet’s scenic Lumberton spilled its secrets when Kyle MacLachlan went running after sultry, damaged Isabella Rossellini, and Laura Palmer continued to lure the citizens of Twin Peaks into a shadowy netherworld long after she was dead. By Lost Highway, Lynch’s most artistically bankrupt film, he’d given up on disguising his obsessions and simply laid them out for all to see; a story that traumatically shifts gears midway through closes with Giovanni Ribisi lured to his doom by Patricia Arquette’s practically demonic temptress. By the film’s end, you realize that for all its pretensions, the film is essentially a self-referential take on the same old story. When in doubt, deconstruct yourself.

Mulholland Dr. is, thankfully, not as miserable an experience as Lost Highway, in the way that getting cavities filled is more fun than a root canal. But it conveys the same sense of onanistic self-regard, as if Lynch expects us to capitulate to every half-baked slice of bland surrealism. (It worked for the Cannes jury, which split the Best Director prize between Lynch and the Coen brothers.) Worse, Lynch is back on the ersatz mythological tack of Wild at Heart. It’s not enough for Mulholland Dr. to be a movie about the twisted logic of Hollywood. Oh, no. It’s distinctly and quite deliberately a Movie About America, in that exceptionally tiresome mode of artists who have let grandiosity take the place of inspiration.

Mulholland Dr. began life as a two-hour TV pilot, and up to a point, it has an episodic, disconnected feel, constantly inserting new characters and plot threads that you keep waiting for the film to return to. (Mostly, it never does.) The main characters, at least, are clear enough. There’s doe-eyed, blond-haired Betty (Naomi Watts), who’s just stepped off a plane, an ingenue looking for her big break. And there’s the black-haired woman who turns up in the apartment Betty’s borrowing from her aunt, with no memory of who she is, only that she’s just been nearly shot to death in a car on Mulholland Drive and she’s stumbled down out of the hills and into Betty’s place. Taking her name from an old movie poster, Betty dubs the stranger Rita (why not Veronica?), but while the stage seems to be set for an eccentric gloss on a typical noir, Mulholland Dr. keeps spiraling off into other vignettes, like the one about the two men in a diner, one describing to the other a disturbing dream he had that was set in that very restaurant, which then proceeds to come true — sort of. Or the one about the intense, frazzled director (Justin Theroux) who comes home to find his wife in bed with a handyman who looks suspiciously like Billy Ray Cyrus.

The director, in fact, winds up as a third major character, though the shards of his own plot are arrayed even more sloppily than the ones concerning the two women. There’s something about some kind of shadowy cabal — represented by Dan Hedaya and frequent Lynch composer Angelo Badalamenti — that has taken over control of the director’s project and seems to have some relationship to a mysterious man who sits in a thronelike chair in the middle of a mainly dark room and whose visitors stand yards away, separated from him by a huge pane of glass. (The man, or at least his head, is played by the backwards-talking midget from Twin Peaks.) And I haven’t even gotten to the Tom Mix look-alike who turns up to offer ominous warnings that the director had better do as he’s told.

If you’re easily bamboozled, you might accept that the utter chaos of all these elements is Lynch’s way of suggesting the infinitely layered and ultimately unknowable layers of collusion and conspiracy that underlie the tanned and sculpted exterior of Los Angeles. But what we’re really looking at is the contents of David Lynch’s upturned junk drawer. By the time the movie gets around to pulling a Lost Highway switcheroo — and it’s a doozy — it’s hard to care if things make sense anymore, or spend any effort trying to sort them out. As always, you can trust Lynch to set a mood, but that’s hardly enough to sustain a two-and-a-half-hour movie (and it feels longer). Mulholland Dr. is full of neat little bits and pieces, but Lynch never commits to any of them. He’s a bit player in his own movie.

(Ritz Five)