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ABC Entertainment, October 18, 2001 |
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Mulholland Drive
Running time: 146 minutes ***** out of 5
by Michael Atkinson Hollywood's foremost idiosyncratic poet of the irrational and one-man narrative anarchist, David Lynch is one of American film culture's most valuable assets — its Pirandello, Sade, and Man Ray, all rolled up into one. With the exception of the masterful but serenely straightforward The Straight Story, Lynch's recent films — Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway, and now Mulholland Drive — can be difficult to decipher or endure at times. And you can't be blamed for wondering if maybe the man could use a producer who doesn't say yes to every bizarre whim and non sequitur. Even so, Lynch's defiant refusal to bend his visions to the orthodox laws of storytelling can be exhilarating once you let down your guard and let the dream-like rhythms become a sensory experience rather than a predictable, purchasable entertainment commodity. In this sense, Mulholland Drive is quintessential Lynch: frustrating, maniacal, loopy, and utterly, charmingly nonsensical. It treats genre conventions like toilet paper, and the usually reliable, concrete aspects of event and character like ethereal daydreams. But what's new, at least since the first few episodes of Twin Peaks, is Mulholland Drive's cumulative pathos. Its characters start as amusing archetypes, morph into other things that have no name, and then end up figures in a hallucinogenic tragedy.At the very least, Drive might be the most scathing movie about Los Angeles since Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful. Lynch's film notoriously began as an ABC pilot that was dumped. With the help of French investors, Lynch took what was the open-ended, meandering start of a tapestry TV series in the Twin Peaks vein, added over 40 minutes of footage, and turned it on its head. Now, plotlines are begun and then abandoned, or rather, stand lonesomely as mini-dramas that reflect the larger ones. The main "story" involves Betty (Naomi Watts), a sugar-spun Canadian girl who comes to L.A. seeking fame and fortune as an actress. She's not in town for even one day before a sultry brunette (Laura Elena Harring) shows up in her shower, calling herself "Rita," after a Rita Hayworth movie poster in the bathroom because she doesn't remember who she is. The two rather delicately set out to uncover the mystery, which includes movie-producer gangsters, a car wreck on the titular roadway, and a young director (Justin Theroux) who's having a rather Lynchian time casting his new film. In one of the movie's stunning left turns, the two women, having found out a good deal but solved nothing, climb into bed together and initiate a lesbian affair that the rest of the movie proceeds to look at through a nightmarish prism. Once Lynch's camera plunges into the mysterious black box with a triangular key, Mulholland Drive runs off the traditional-movie rails and becomes something utterly unique. Yet, instead of merely piling up the surrealities, it grows increasingly heartbroken and wrenching. It's a rather prosaic film visually — with the years, Lynch seems less interested in being visually expressive (a strategy that dominated his first four films), and more inclined toward free-associative narrative shape-shifting. Indeed, the reworking of Mulholland Drive's original and witty script often feels as if it were executed via automatic writing (which, if you believe Lynch's interviews, is close to how he works). The results haunt the back of your skull. It bears noting that Mulholland Drive works in the very strange way that it does because of Watts, who does some breathtaking shape-shifting herself: from Nancy Drew virgin, to dyke nympho, to weathered Hollywood trash, and onward. Amid the chaos of this marvelous, uncategorizable film squirms one of the year's best performances.
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