MULHOLLAND DRIVE Review

David Lynch.

I love that name, the thoughts that it brings to mind. His name is nearly its own hallucinogen. You speak it and like a strange surrealist airborne virus it infects fellow cinephiles to talk about the color red, parallel realities, cross-dressing FBI agents, men on riding lawnmowers, floating fatmen, sideshow freaks, Pabst Blue Ribbon, bloody mayhem, bent realities and so much more.

David Lynch.

He’s like Terry Gilliam’s brother who discovered porn and the straight razor and never was the same again.

David Lynch.

The name means it is not safe to walk into the theater. He will, quite frankly, fuck with you. He really doesn’t care what you came to see, what you thought you came to see, what you think he is going to do with you, he might very well reach into the bikini zone without permission. He is a wrong man.

Bless him for it!

This blasted back injury and recovery nearly cost me one of my favorite cinematic experiences this year. I’ve been trying to see this movie ever since Cannes. I had a ticket to it there, but the bus bringing me back from this modest French Villa took way longer than it should have and I missed the chance to get all tux-ed out and be lynched.

When the film played first run here in Austin, it was at a theater that I didn’t really care to watch films at. Tim at the Drafthouse told me it would be coming there, but as the Holiday season began, the screenings came fast and furious. Almost no air in-between them. It is easy to forget something intended.

After the third viewing of FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING, I realized that I had been putting off MULHOLLAND DRIVE, not because I didn’t want to see it, but because of my mania for Peter Jackson’s latest. That film made it hard for me to concentrate. All I wanted to do, all that my thoughts would think about was watching the movie again. I was in danger of dropping off into hopeless fanboy oblivion… And I was happy. Happy and content.

I was sitting there at Subway with my 500 cal sandwich, debating whether or not to follow my 3rd showing of FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING, by heading over to the Drafthouse to see MULHOLLAND DRIVE. Generally after Jackson’s film, I want post-coital petting, that smoke in bed, time to sniff the bouquet of this fine brandy. I need down time. Time to decompress. This is usually about 22 hours, but I felt a sense of urgency. This was a Wednesday night, there was a chance that the film could be leaving the Drafthouse, and then I’d have to wait for video (blech) and nobody should ever watch Lynch on video the first time.

I called Tim up, he told me it would be leaving the next night, but I had a screening of ALI then, so it was either tonight or never. Carpe Diem.

I don’t read reviews of Lynch films. I just don’t see the point. It would be like trying to find videos of a new girlfriend fucking. You haven’t gone there yet, and you want to know if it is worth the wait. Well, this was a movie I knew I was taking to bed, it didn’t matter if it was worth it or not, I was committed.

When the film started, there was no doubt. Yup, I’m in a Lynch movie. The angles were off, the colors rich, the music compelling. Everything was like reality, but really not. There was an air of deception and I knew all was not O.K.

Lynch finds the best women you know. From the second I saw Laura Harring in the back of that car, I knew… YUMMY. There suddenly came the moment of realization for her character in this opening scene. The moment where she suddenly knows she’s trapped in a David Lynch movie. And the cruel God of her universe decrees to let her live with no idea of who she was or what had happened.

This is the MacGuffin that served MEMENTO so well. Lynch has explored this before in TWIN PEAKS. It was played with beautifully in Alan Parker’s ANGEL HEART. It came into play in the perfect BLUE DAHLIA. Hitchcock mined the territory with the help of Salvador Dali in the fantastic SPELLBOUND. Everybody had it in DEAD AGAIN it seemed. Heck, this year it came into play with not only MEMENTO, but VANILLA SKY and THE MAJESTIC and even A BEAUTIFUL MIND.

Why give your character amnesia? What does it serve? Well, it makes things NOT SAFE. It makes the character doubt themselves, what they can do, what they can’t do. It makes nobody trust them and everybody want to help them. It puts the audience on the same page as the character. Before the movie started doesn’t matter, there is no history, it is a story that plays out completely for you. Nothing happened before the lights dimmed, and if it did, we’re going to find out together with the character.

I wanted to spend time getting to know Laura Harring in this film. She was hot as hell. She had this whole little lost girl in a to die for body thing going on, and I wanted to be the lecherous guy in the alley. (Yes, I need help.) As she falls asleep behind a hedge, I realized… this never happens to me. I never walk out my front door and find a girl behind my hedge with a knock on the head. Never. I just checked again. Still not there damn it! My only sense of aggravation was that I knew I was completely screwed if I wanted to see this girl naked, as this film started life as a TV Pilot for ABC. I really can’t imagine that Lynch called his actresses back and told them, "Look, it ain’t gonna be a TV series, I want to shoot some nude scenes with ya chicks… it’ll help sell the film!" They’d slap him and walk off the project. That wasn’t the project they signed aboard.

With that bit of annoyance, I was next introduced to a character that kind of bugged me. The actress was Naomi Watts. I didn’t recognize her, though she was lovely… she was just annoyingly perky. She was just too up, too positive, too happy, too clean… Teaming her up with this Harring chick, well it was just evil. You see, Harring screamed sex… Watts looked like the type whose knees were super-glued. Ya know? Maybe Lynch would do some sort of corruption thing here. Soil Snow White, ya know?

He threw a weird diner sort of scene at me, and all of a sudden like, the universe was NOT RIGHT. There was danger.

For you folks that don’t want spoilers, let me just say SEE THE MOVIE. It is thrilling, erotic and fantastic. Completely cinematic, absolutely enthralling. One of my absolute favorite movies of the year. Just bliss. It made me remember that other movies beside FELLOWSHIP can enrapture me. COMPLETELY Wonderful. Oh, and HOT… HOT AS HELL! One of the most stirring (this is a code word) surreal suspense films since DePalma’s DRESSED TO KILL. If you liked that film, don’t miss this one at all!

Now I’m going to discuss two scenes that if you haven’t seen this film, don’t read. It is important that these two scenes hit you blank the first time. Trust me, leave now. Please. Leave now!

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Ok, so you’ve seen the movie. You probably know the two scenes that I’m going to talk about.

First, the Audition scene. Watts’ audition scene, the lead up to it and the actual performance during it was one of the most uncomfortably arousing and intimate scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie.

Watts is a world class actress for this scene. It completely changes her character and elevated the movie to a new level, which the film continues in. First off, this could very well be my favorite scene in film this year.

The whole film, they build her character to be this wide-eyed gosh gee whillikers type. When she is rehearsing for this scene with Harring, it is totally goofball, as you would expect her character to be. Then we move into the audition, and we realize… She is a Star. Just a hands down, holy shit, who the hell is this actress and when did she show up in this movie. Not only that, but it then turns and deepens her character to a point of poignancy and depth that I wasn’t even prepared for.

It was done in one take, one shot. It wasn’t that we were in an intimate scene. It was an audition. We knew the dialogue was badly written. We knew she didn’t seem to take it serious. There’s like 6 other people on screen watching this Audition, in addition to all of us in the audience. The actor she is going to be reading opposite is a ham, a sleazy cheap feels sort of slime… He wants to play the scene close, so he can manhandle her. Lynch decides to take us in close too, get us right there so we can smell the perfume, feel the breath of the scene. About halfway through the scene I was disturbed how arousingly private the scene was. Now I don’t know if it just hit some private kink of intimacy in my mind. If it just ‘floated my boat’, but frankly you see so many clumsy, terribly awkward scenes in film. Intimacy usually means anal sex in Hollywood. It sure as hell doesn’t mean dialogue whispered inside of kisses while nose dodging… and the actions were completely ludicrous to the scene, upon first thought, but how the two performed it, SPECIFICALLY Watts… Brilliant. Just absolutely the best acted moment on film this year. PERFECT. Perfect in the best most wonderful of acting ways. Completely disarming. I literally felt bad for watching. This felt like a private moment between two people that hated but loved one another. I felt like a pervert pressed against a plate glass window peeping. But I could not look away. It was completely arresting.

And that scene made me wonder what else Lynch was going to do. I mean, the scene was just a classic scene.

However, the film has hit a new level. It was headed in a new, more powerfully character invested direction. When we suddenly hit the "Lesbian Scene" dear god… Lynch nailed it. It wasn’t that he just had two incredibly hot actresses going at it. Not only were they dreams of the naked female form. But we were invested in their relationship. I bought hook, line and sinker that they had fallen in love. That they cared for one another. That this was the most logical wonderful sort of revelation. It wasn’t… "Oh boy, here’s the Lesbian Scene, break out the lubricant," it was a happiness that these two discovered that this was there for them. I loved that it wasn’t a mistake for their characters. I love that the film becomes about ill-fated circles of love. That fate is twisted and wrong, and that through an eternity of alternate possibilities that these two were meant to be together, but doomed for brevity in that perfection.

Sometimes that is what love is. Sometimes it is a moment, a place and a time. And trying to make it longer, trying to make it permanent, trying to make it last for life… It is doom. The Gods, the director, the governing force for the way life works just doesn’t have that plan for you.

Lynch has made what could very well be his best film here. At the very least I love it more than any other film of his. STRAIGHT STORY did him good. In making that film he seems to understand characters that are not just STRANGE. In MULHOLLAND DRIVE he marries the two. The sultry and the innocent. The rural and the city. The dream and the nightmare. He has become an even more dangerous filmmaker than he has ever been.

The movie devastated me. BRAVO!

Just for the record, the Drafthouse followed this with FLESH GORDON… what a triple feature Wednesday. FELLOWSHIP OF THE RINGS, MULHOLLAND DRIVE and FLESH GORDON. Life is good!