WOW! Ol' Father Geek has been shelving scripts out in the new AICN screening room here in Austin this morning, and believe it or not the last one I put up before coming in to soak up some air con, and check Email was... David Lynch's MULHOLLAND DRIVE... then what do my wondering eyes behold in my mail box, but Froggy's latest report from Cannes ooooooon none other than... that's it... David Lynch's MULHOLLAND DRIVE... Here's Froggy...
Greetings again. Froggy reporting for duty, as promised, on the new film by David Lynch, MULHOLLAND DRIVE.
For those of you in a minority who aren't aware of the origins of this project, MULHOLLAND DRIVE was to be a weekly drama series for ABC tv in the U.S.
Lynch shot a pilot which came in at 126mins. The network told him that (a) they weren't happy with a lot of the content and (b) that it was too long to fit the traditional two hour timeslot. Not sure about what happened next, but word is that Lynch cut it back to 88 mins, and as a result the whole thing became borderline incomprehensible, and the whole thing was dumped.
Two years later, some European bigwigs threw some money at Lynch to complete the project. Earlier this year he found a way to end it that came to him "in a dream", and the resulting 2hr 27 min feature film was screened this morning.
Unfortunately, the end result is bizarre to say the least, and certainly unsatisfying - that is, in a sense that you can't avoid the project's TV series origins. The film of MULHOLLAND DRIVE is like one big tease; you're introduced to characters that you'll never see again, endless plotlines that are never resolved... it's like sitting down to a banquet of twenty courses but only being offered a teaspoon of each. Even though I wouldn't have missed it for the world, I felt cheated.
The plot doesn't really warrant going through in much detail, particularly because this site has run some pretty thorough reviews of the script and the TV pilot. The basic plot revolves around a couple of characters
BETTY (Naomi Watts) is a young blond actress, fresh into L.A. from the middle of nowhere, with a positive outlook and sunny disposition matched only by her desire to make it in Hollywood. She checks into the airport and arrives at the leafy townhouse that her aunt, who works in the industry but is in Toronto on a shoot, is allowing her to stay in. Betty gets a shock when she finds that she's not alone in the apartment. There, naked in the shower, is RITA.
Rita is a woman who we see has survived a horrific car crash, which was fortuititous because just before it happened she was about to be murdered. Rita was the only survivor, and has completely lost her memory. She's taken her name from the GILDA poster in the apartment. Betty decides to take on the job of helping Rita recover her memory. The inclination to go to the police is complicated by the hundreds of thousands of dollars found stashed into Rita's handbag, and a mysteriously shaped key.
Mixed into this story is that of a hotshot film director (Justin Theroux), whose latest project is being recast against his will. The weirdo financiers/producers are forcing upon him a young actress (Melissa George) he hasn't even met for the lead. He's also come home early to find his wife in bed with, and I am not kidding, Billy Ray Cyrus. Theroux is contacted by a mysterious cowboy, who offers to guide him through his dilemmas.. and also has the habit of appearing and disappearing into thin air ("You will see me once more if you do good, and twice if you do bad").
If this all sounds vaguely reminscent of TWIN PEAKS, you're not wrong. The entire project reeks of all Lynch's earlier works, and in particular has heavy echoes of his masterful film LOST HIGHWAY. Without giving too much away, towards the end of the film the characters all go through a fundamental shift, and the last section takes place in a seemingly parallel world of the Los Angeles that we've just spent two hours in. Like LOST HIGHWAY, the film ends up as a mobieus strip. I felt pretty ripped off. Oh, did I mention that there is some pretty full-on lesbo action?
Anyway, I should say that the film is never dull to watch, even though you can tell that it was shot for TV. The quality of the image isn't fabulous, and there are an awful lot of closeups. The actors all acquit themselves respectably (Watts does a terrific job at sustaining the goodness-aura of her character , and is no less believable when she takes a darker turn). There are also no shortage of those Lynchian touches - the obsession with coffee, characters named 'Diane', bogeymen in the shadows, red curtains, dramatic female torch singers, midgets, freaky looking old people (and teeny-tiny versions of them that run in under the front door), and dark, winding roads.
No matter how you dress it up, MULHOLLAND DRIVE is a bigscreen TV pilot with twenty minutes of extra mindfuck at the end, and I imagine that even the most diehard of Lynch fans will be unsatisfied by it. It also makes you wonder how stupid the execs at ABC were in passing on what could have been, like TWIN PEAKS, a seriously compelling and talked about weekly show.
p.s. I could have sworn I saw PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON at the screening, and he looked really jazzed afterwards. Can anyone confirm that PT is at Cannes, presumably for New Line? If not, perhaps there are Lynchian forces at work because this guy was the spitting image of PTA.
that's all for now from FROGGY. I'm off to see AVALON and the new Hal Hartley. .
