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| Mulholland Drive |  |
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Twin Peaks stands as one of my favorite television series ever made. But if you slapped the first three episodes together and called it a movie, I doubt I'd feel the same way. Mulholland Drive was originally intended as David Lynch's return to TV. Rumored to be a creepy and atmospheric drama, I had anticipated another Peaks -- and prayed for something better than Lynch's disastrous "sitcom" On The Air.
Trouble began when ABC abruptly pulled the plug on Mulholland, but Lynch, ever the trooper, decided to take the footage he'd shot so far and turn it into a movie. Of course, a few things would have to be added -- namely a lot of nudity and oozing sexuality and, well, an ending -- so it was back to the set for extra shooting. The result is archetypical Lynch -- creepy, uncomfortable, erotic, and devoid of all logic whatsoever.
The story, as much as there is one to describe, is told much like any TV pilot would do. Characters are fed to us slowly -- remember, this was supposed to carry us over 13 hours or so -- and plot details are drawn with a large brush. We witness a Hollywood car crash and meet its amnesiac victim (Laura Harring), we see a farm girl/aspiring starlet (Naomi Watts) take her in and befriend her, and we sit in on a series of strange meetings surrounding the making of an artsy, difficult director's (Justin Theroux) Big Movie. And somewhere among the apartment buildings, the dingy diner, the studio lot, and Mulholland Drive itself, these stories will intersect.
Whether those stories will be comprehensible (and whether that's an important quality for a film to have) are something else entirely, and as with any Lynch movie, it's pretty much up to the viewer to decide all that on his own. Personally, I think that story does matter, and I'd also say that Mulholland Drive simply doesn't make sense when looked at with a critical eye. You can make up your own mind, but between the mystical matter-transference box and its triangular key, a pair of giggling seniors, a yeti that lives in a parking lot, and a good dozen character identity changes a la the boneheaded Lost Highway, even the most patient moviegoer will be utterly lost starting right at the fade in.
I realize that faulting Lynch for not making sense is a bit like being mad at the dog for digging in the garbage. It's in his nature to be random. But Twin Peaks and movies like Blue Velvet are masterworks because they managed to be cryptic think-pieces and still satisfy you in the end, backwards-talking dwarfs or no. To be certain, Mulholland Drive is gutsy and has moments of greatness: Watts' virtuoso audition with a far-too-tanned leading man shows how truly magnificent the movie could have been. Other vignettes are just as memorable -- like when a perfectly ordinary event like coming home from work suddenly turns into a nightmare -- but they end up being islands in an ocean of overly pregnant pauses and wild tangents.
But again, I have to harp on this: Far, far too much of the film (clocking in at almost 2 1/2 hours long) is nonsense. Most notably, near the hurried finale, Harring drags Watts to a way-after-hours performance wherein musicians don't play their instruments. Watts ends up shaking violently until a magic box appears in her lap. Um, okaaaaayyyyy.... It all sounds like some silly dream Lynch once had and scribbled down during the middle of the night. Who knows, maybe that was the point.
Technically, the film is assured and reasonably memorable. The actors' performances (virtually all unknowns) are good but hardly career-making -- with the dual exceptions of Watts and Lafayette Montgomery's miniscule yet thunderous role as a cowboy somehow pulling all the strings. The camerawork is typical of Lynch but his use of out-of-focus shots -- presumably meant to make us question our perspective -- ends up being distracting more than anything else. The music, by longtime Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti and Lynch himself, is appropriately creepy when it needs to be and fun when levity is needed.
To his credit, Lynch at least tried to wrap everything up in the last 20 minutes. It all involves that damn magic box, but still, he does pay lip service to the notion of plot structure. It's no "Who killed Laura Palmer?", but it's something to chew on. It's just too bad that trying to make heads or tails of the dozen last-minute plot twists is a bit like trying to analyze jazz -- the more you think about it, the less sensical it becomes. Let the movie go, and you'll find it far more enjoyable.
by Christopher Null
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