MULHOLLAND DR. (2001) [8/10]

A slinky brunette (Laura Elena Harring) stumbles from a car crash on Hollywood’s Mulholland Drive. Bewildered and amnesiac, she calls herself “Rita” (as in Hayworth) and befriends Betty (Naomi Watts) a naive blonde who’s just arrived in town from Canada. Hotshot young film director Adam (Justin 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 (Michael J Anderson) and a shadowy figure known only as “The Cowboy” (Monty 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 one may 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 energy often derives from embracing the irrational, and he’s always been happier evoking moods than exploring ideas: this lack of smart-alec 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 visuals here: Harring and Watts taking a short cut up from Mulholland Drive 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, Dan Hedaya and Robert Forster are disappointingly restricted to one-scene cameos apiece.

But Lynch’s unique approach to casting sees eyecatching support turns from composer Angelo Badalamenti, Billy Ray Cyrus (of all people) and veterans Lee Grant and Ann Miller, a golden-age musicals star making a welcome return to the big screen after 25 years. The latter is entirely appropriate for a movie which 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 “Monty” 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 Lost Highway, just as the Roy Orbison song we hear in the 2am-nightclub scene is a limp rehash of Dean Stockwell’s miming 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 Dr is the undeniably work of an artist treading water. But while he may never again match The Elephant Man and Blue 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 when treading water, Lynch makes movies most directors can only dream of.

Neil Young

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)