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Denver Post, October 12, 2001 |
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movie review
And what a bizarrely seductive, hypnotic "hello" it is. The film opens with several couples, at first shown in silhouette and then clear as a sunny day, jitterbugging against a rich, luxuriant lavender background. The music bops, but grows repetitive and then angrily discordant as the dancers swing and jive. Then there's a white-out - like an erupting sunspot - and a woman walks into the brilliance and smiles. We see multiple images of her, or so we think. Wow! Where are we? And where is this movie going to go next? In Lynch's most powerfully original and influential work, primarily "Blue Velvet" and the "Twin Peaks" television series, he tells his story from the point of view of the subconscious. That provides a disorienting, surreal effect, while the story itself is rooted in a traditional genre - noirish mystery, primarily. In "Velvet" and "Peaks," the characters often seem to have escaped from the dream state, as when Dean Stockwell lip-syncs Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" in "Velvet." Yet they also are planted in a real place - small-town America. That makes it all the creepier. "Mulholland Drive," the equal to his best work, finds Lynch's tent pitched in the usual wistfully ephemeral geography, but this time it's also set in L.A. Or rather, Hollywood, already a "dream factory" and now double so because Lynch is near it. The story again is a noirish mystery, but there also are updated elements of the old-fashioned inside-Hollywood melodrama. It reminds me of "Sunset Boulevard."
The trick for Lynch is to bring the elements of his vision together, to make his strange films seem purposeful and even profound, without making them seem too self-consciously (or just plain consciously) plotted. On "Lost Highway," he strayed from that sense of purpose. But on "Mulholland Drive," he finds his way. I find the film revelatory and even epiphanic; consequently I'm afraid to say too much about it lest I ruin the process of discovery of watching the movie. And "Mulholland Drive" very much is about what it means to be discovered, in all the meanings of the word. "Mulholland Drive" started as a network TV series, and Lynch filmed some of what's here as the pilot. When that was rejected, he worked the idea into a movie. Perhaps because of the TV origins, there is at times a lack of depth in some of Peter Deming's cinematography. But the balancing reliance on hauntingly intense close-ups compensates. There is also consistently startling imagery to match the deft, varying camera technique. The camera movements sometimes are subtle and sometimes roaring, as when Deming zooms in toward the entrance to an eerie theater from ground level, where trash blows around a la "American Beauty." And the color is as joltingly rich as fresh blood. The sinister music by Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalementi aids the mood, as well as the blue-note rhythms by which the film unfolds. The film basically features two separate, parallel stories involving two women whose lives grow closer together until their tales completely intertwine, like clinging vines moving from different walls to cover a house. As the stories grow closer, the movie starts to stride and soar on its rhythms, even as it becomes less conventionally plotted. In short, it feels right. In this case, you watch with eyes wide open - disbelief completely suspended. (At least I did.) We meet one woman, a dark brunette in a black gown (the maturely sensual Laura Harring, a modern-day Paula Prentiss), sitting in the back of a car traveling along L.A.'s hilly, scenic Mulholland Drive at night. Suddenly, a man in the front pulls a gun on her. Suddenly, as if they've zipped in from another movie, drag racers collide with the car and she stumbles down a hill toward Sunset Boulevard. There, she takes refuge in a sumptuously genteel, villa-style apartment. Meanwhile, a pert and dreamy Tuesday Weld-like blond named Betty (Naomi Watts, in a star-making turn) arrives at the L.A. airport from Ontario. She aspires to be an actress - and she's as sweet as a teenage daughter on a 1950s sitcom. Ebullient and gleeful, exuding compliant softness in her pink sweater, she helps an equally joyful elderly lady with her bags. And then she travels to her out-of-town aunt's sumptuously genteel, villa-style apartment. Yes, it is the same place. Betty finds the mysterious and fearful woman, suffering from amnesia, in the shower. When she asks her name, the woman looks at a movie poster on the wall - it stars Rita Hayworth - and declares herself "Rita." The two slowly grow dependent on each other, psychologically and eventually sexually in a steamy scene that probably wasn't filmed with the TV series in mind. Lynch has surrounded their, and our, quest for meaning with one fascinating embellishment after another. Some are funny, such as when Betty's exotically proper landlady (Ann Miller, Hollywood's veteran "Queen of Tap") frets about a past tenant's pet kangaroo. Some make you nervously amused, as when a hip young movie director (Justin Theroux, looking like Bono in thick glasses) meets a soft-spoken midnight cowboy at a late-night corral. One of "Mulholland Drive's" best scenes is played relatively straight, when Betty auditions for a movie role before an old guard of filmmakers - including an inanely enigmatic director and a Ted Knight-like leading man. She seduces them with an amazingly erotically charged reading. As ever, Lynch does great things with old pop tunes, cutting through the nostalgia of oldies to reach their more unsettling, primal core. Here, actresses in a faux recording studio lip-sync to Connie Stevens' "Sixteen Reasons" and Linda Scott's "Every Little Star." And in a show-stopping moment, a woman named Rebecca Del Rio performs Roy Orbison's "Crying" in Spanish. It occurs in an otherworldly late-night theater where the emcee demands "silencio." If it's Lynch's intention to stun us into silence with the mysteries of life, he does so. Steven Rosen discusses film at 8 a.m. Fridays on The Peak, 95.1 FM in Colorado Springs.
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