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MULHOLLAND
DR.
8/10
aka
Mulholland Drive. : USA 2001
director/script
: David Lynch
cinematography : Peter Deming
editing : Mary Sweeney (also a producer)
music : Angelo Badalamenti
lead actors : Naomi Watts, Laura Elena Harring, Justin Theroux, Ann Miller
also : Michael Anderson, Lafayette Montgomery
146 minutes
A
slinky brunette (Harring) stumbles from a car crash on Hollywood’s Mulholland
Drive. Bewildered and amnesiac, she calls herself Rita – as in Hayworth
– and befriends Betty (Watts) a naïve blonde who’s just arrived in town
from Canada. A hotshot young film director Adam (Theroux) is coming under
strong pressure from the mafia-like producers of his new project, while
behind the scenes lurk the real string-pullers: paraplegic midget Mr Roque
(Anderson) and a shadowy figure known only as The Cowboy (Montgomery).
All the elements are in place for a neo-noir mystery thriller – then at
the two-hour point writer-director Lynch throws all the pieces into the
air, forcing audience and characters alike to play a very different kind
of game…
There
is a very straightforward explanation
for what seems, at first, to be an entirely baffling turn of events –
but it’s so basic you presume Lynch has another agenda in
mind. If so, it’s impossible to fathom – and we’re probably wasting our
time even trying. As Lost Highway showed, Lynch’s anergy often
comes from embracing the irrational, and he’s always been happier evoking
moods than exploring ideas: this lack of smart-ass cleverness is perhaps
what makes his surrealism so approachable and enjoyable. He takes us with
him, confident we’re in safe hands: Lynch is one of the very few directors
who makes the audience feel he can do anything he likes with sound and
image. There are some amazing images here: Harring and Watts taking a
short cut up from Mulholland to a hilltop mansion, the city gradually
coming into view behind them as they stalk through the foliage. And there
are delicious moments when Lynch’s bravura technique combines with his
weird sense of humour, producing some of the funniest, most startling
and memorable scenes you’ll find in any film this year.
Despite
the ambitiously long running-time, there’s one truly duff sequence in
the whole two-and-a-half hours: Rita and Betty’s 2am visit a bizarre nightclub-theatre
is a forced, tedious kind of cod-surrealism. But this is very much an
exception: crucially, the performers all seem to ‘get’ what Lynch is doing
– especially Theroux and Watts, who rarely puts a foot wrong in a nightmarishly
difficult role. Despite prominent billing, Hedaya and Forster are disappointingly
restricted to one-scene cameos apiece, but Lynch’s unique approach to
casting sees eyecatching support turns from composer Badalamenti, Billy
Ray Cyrus (of all people) and veterans Lee Grant and Miller, a veteran
star of musicals star making her return to the big-screen after 25 years
off. Entirely appropriate for a movie that presents LA as a phantasmagoric
town of the not-quite-dead – Lynch’s insistence on the abbreviated title
isn’t the only nod to Sunset Blvd. The Cowboy is thus Lynch’s pale-faced
spirit of Hollywood Past, a Gower-Gulch ghost come back to give ‘new Hollywood’
a ticking-off, in an electric scene given extra resonance by the fact
that the dubious-sounding ‘Lafayette Montgomery’ is himself a shadowy
enigma with no prior credits.
Then
again, The Cowboy – for all his impact - is clearly a variation on the
Mystery Man from Highway, just as the Roy Orbison song we hear
in the 2am-nightclub scene is a limp rehash of Dean Stockwell’s mime antics
in Blue Velvet. Lynch
isn’t exactly reaching out to new audiences here, nor is he breaking any
new ground. Likewise, there’s nothing wrong with Badalamenti’s atmospheric
score - except the fact that we’ve heard it so often before: for all its
virtues, Mulholland is the undeniably work of an artist treading
water. But while he may never again match The Elephant Man and
Velvet, it’s unfair to use those classics as sticks with which
to hit him whenever he falls short. We should instead remember that, even
treading water, Lynch makes movies most directors can only dream of.
25th
November, 2001
(seen
Nov-1-01, National Film Theatre – London Film Festival, and Nov-24-01,
Tyneside Cinema Newcastle – LFF on tour)
for a longer
analysis of Mulholland Dr, click here
(warning – contains SPOILERS)
by Neil
Young
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