The Dallas Morning News: 10.19.2001

Mulholland Drive

By CHRIS VOGNAR

It's no secret that David Lynch likes to leave viewers in the dark, fumbling around for clues and entry points to his dreamlike illogic. His films bend the lines separating self-indulgent incoherence and inspired ambiguity. Sometimes, as in his first feature Eraserhead and the more recent Lost Highway, those lines are splintered into pieces.

But Mulholland Drive may be his best balancing act yet. It keeps bending, keeps buckling, but never breaks down. Elegantly haunting, assured but still deeply mysterious, it's his best film since Blue Velvet and one of the best this year.

Mr. Lynch usually sets his all-American malaise in fictional, out-of-the-way underbellies – Lumberton in Blue Velvet; Twin Peaks in Twin Peaks. But this time he's gone straight to the boulevard of broken dreams. Hollywood has rarely felt this alluringly sleazy or illusory, at least not since the heyday of noir. This Tinseltown is where dreams go to die. Unless they happen to be psychosexual nightmares, in which case they're robust and healthy.

A striking brunette (former Texan and Miss USA Laura Elena Harring) stumbles away from a car crash and ambles toward Sunset Boulevard (not coincidentally the name of one of Mr. Lynch's favorite films). A blonde naif (Naomi Watts) deplanes in L.A. and, like so many naifs over the years, sets her wide eyes on stardom. They meet up and become Mr. Lynch's doppelgängers, the dark/light embodiments of womanhood who have played a role in so many of his films. But their identities and motives, like most elements of Mulholland, are not what they seem (much as in Twin Peaks, where the supposedly wholesome Laura Palmer took her share of dark secrets to the grave).

You notice something vaguely off-center as you watch Mulholland Drive, the feeling that we've fallen deep in another one of Mr. Lynch's alternative realities. But the unease has a stately quality this time, and a minimum of the default grotesquerie that marred the likes of Wild at Heart. The film is engrossing even at its most frustrating, partially because the two protagonists are as lost as we are. Confusion loves company as much as misery does, and Mr. Lynch does us a favor by giving his heroines a mystery to solve. They do much of the sleuth work for us, allow us to empathize with their quest, and give us a bit of ground to stand on when the big twist arrives.

Which isn't to say you're in for easy sailing. You have to think that Mr. Lynch liked the idea of settling into a place where waking dreams are so prevalent, if often deluded. It's a perfect match, the dreamkeeper set loose in the City of Dreams, given thematic reign to weave his bafflement. It's easy, justifiable and perhaps even necessary to say out of one side of your mouth that you liked Mulholland Drive, and admit out of the other side that you couldn't connect all the dots. Its meticulous layering brings pleasure to uncertainty and smirks at the tidiness for which most Hollywood films are known.

Of course Hollywood is also known for lies and deception. Another piece of this puzzle involves a bratty director (Justin Theroux) strong-armed by heavies into putting the "right" actress in his film. The words "This is the girl" become a mantra of sorts for Mulholland Drive, the phrase that pays in a land where power, fame, and ambition go a lot farther than talent. It's little wonder that women have identity issues in this Hollywood – they're practically interchangeable to the guys upstairs.

There's a tendency to dismiss Mr. Lynch's melodramatics as easy irony, and his tongue does often find its way into his cheek. But Mulholland Drive is far more earnest than it may get credit for; indeed, the earnestness is a key part of the film's tension. Ms. Watts captures the ingenue's gee-whiz, can't-believe-I'm here excitement with such sincerity that we're practically meant to snicker. But if her gushing is ironic, it's not cheap. It's central to the rabbit hole through which she falls in the film's final section, and it has a bitter aftertaste.

Mulholland Drive was originally conceived as a television pilot, a fact that can't be entirely concealed in the finished product (especially when billed actors such as Robert Forster and Dan Hedaya might as well be mute in their brief appearances). But it's actually the kind of quandary that suits Mr. Lynch well: His work is so interpretive and surreal that a few shotgun touches can slide in and almost feel right at home. He has said that he likes watching films that give him room to dream, and he's never been better at sharing that sensation with his viewers.