David Lynch has been working toward "Mulholland Drive" all of his
career, and now that he's arrived there I forgive him "Wild at Heart" and
even "Lost Highway." At last his experiment doesn't shatter the test
tubes. The movie is a surrealist dreamscape in the form of a Hollywood
film noir, and the less sense it makes, the more we can't stop watching
it.
It tells the story of . . . well, there's no way to finish that
sentence. There are two characters named Betty and Rita who the movie
follows through mysterious plot loops, but by the end of the film we
aren't even sure they're different characters, and Rita (an amnesiac who
lifted the name from a "Gilda" poster) wonders if she's really Diane
Selwyn, a name from a waitress' name tag.
Betty (Naomi Watts) is a perky blond, Sandra Dee crossed with a
Hitchcock heroine, who has arrived in town to stay in her absent Aunt
Ruth's apartment and audition for the movies. Rita (Laura Elena Harring)
is a voluptuous brunet who is about to be murdered when her limousine is
front-ended by drag racers. She crawls out of the wreckage on Mulholland
Drive, stumbles down the hill, and is taking a shower in the aunt's
apartment when Betty arrives.
Rita doesn't remember anything, even her name. Betty decides to help
her. As they try to piece her life back together, the movie introduces
other characters. A movie director (Justin Theroux) is told to cast an
actress in his movie or be murdered; a dwarf in a wheelchair (Michael J.
Anderson) gives instructions by cell phone; two detectives turn up, speak
standard TV cop show dialogue, and disappear; a landlady (Ann Miller--yes,
Ann Miller) wonders who the other girl is in Aunt Ruth's apartment; Betty
auditions; the two girls climb in through a bedroom window, Nancy Drew
style; a rotting corpse materializes, and Betty and Rita have two lesbian
love scenes so sexy you'd swear this was a 1970s movie, made when movie
audiences liked sex. One of the scenes also contains the funniest example
of pure logic in the history of sex scenes.
Having told you all of that, I've basically explained nothing. The
movie is hypnotic; we're drawn along as if one thing leads to another--but
nothing leads anywhere, and that's even before the characters start to
fracture and recombine like flesh caught in a kaleidoscope. "Mulholland
Drive" isn't like "Memento," where if you watch it closely enough, you can
hope to explain the mystery. There is no explanation. There may not even
be a mystery.
There have been countless dream sequences in the movies, almost all of
them conceived with Freudian literalism to show the characters having
nightmares about the plot. "Mulholland Drive" is all dream. There is
nothing that is intended to be a waking moment. Like real dreams, it does
not explain, does not complete its sequences, lingers over what it finds
fascinating, dismisses unpromising plotlines. If you want an explanation
for the last half hour of the film, think of it as the dreamer rising
slowly to consciousness, as threads from the dream fight for space with
recent memories from real life, and with fragments of other dreams--old
ones and those still in development.
This works because Lynch is absolutely uncompromising. He takes what
was frustrating in some of his earlier films, and instead of backing away
from it, he charges right through. "Mulholland Drive" is said to have been
assembled from scenes that he shot for a 1999 ABC television pilot, but no
network would air (or understand) this material, and Lynch knew it. He
takes his financing where he can find it and directs as fancy dictates.
This movie doesn't feel incomplete because it could never be
complete--closure is not a goal.
Laura Elena Harring and Naomi Watts take the risk of embodying
Hollywood archetypes, and get away with it because they are
archetypes. Not many actresses would be bold enough to name themselves
after Rita Hayworth, but Harring does, because she can. Slinky and
voluptuous in clinging gowns, all she has to do is stand there and she's
the first good argument in 55 years for a "Gilda" remake. Naomi Watts is
bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, a plucky girl detective. Like a dream, the
movie shifts easily between tones; there's an audition where a girl singer
performs "Sixteen Reasons" and "I Told Every Little Star," and the movie
isn't satirizing "American Bandstand," it's channeling it.
This is a movie to surrender yourself to. If you require logic, see
something else. "Mulholland Drive" works directly on the emotions, like
music. Individual scenes play well by themselves, as they do in dreams,
but they don't connect in a way that makes sense--again, like dreams. The
way you know the movie is over is that it ends. And then you tell a
friend, "I saw the weirdest movie last night." Just like you tell them you
had the weirdest dream.
From Chicago
Sun-Times
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