2001 / 145 Minutes / R
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz

David Lynch, you’ve done it again. Now, hold on, before you call and reserve tickets, that isn’t necessarily a good thing.

I have never really cared for David Lynch. If that makes me a hopeless square, so be it. If that means I am not cool, not trendy, not a true cinema aficionado, well, whatever. I could give less of a shit. Lynch has always pissed me off for one simple reason: I can rarely tell what the fuck his movies are supposed to be about. He is capable of brilliance. After all, he did do “The Straight Story” which was simple and elegant in the way of a wonderful poem. In that movie, he was spot on in depicting the way people talked, the way they moved, the things they said and the things they left unsaid. “The Straight Story” was brilliant and beautiful and inspiring. It also gave me hope. I had hoped Lynch had turned a corner. Yes, I had heard that “Mulholland Drive” was a great film, one of the year’s best and perhaps Lynch’s greatest achievement. If his last film had been “Lost Highway”, then there is no way you would have gotten me near the theater. Because “Lost Highway” largely sucks. Sure, it had its moments. There is a chilling moment at a party where Bill Pullman is advised by a strange man to make a phone call to his own house….only to have the phone answered by himself. That moment rightly got on more than a couple “Creepies Moments in Cinema” lists. No one is better at darkness and depravity than David Lynch.

So far so good, right? Not quite. Because, while Dave does have a great idea of how to craft a creepy moment, he doesn’t really know how to add them up. “Lost Highway” was without punch because the film was a total washout. There was no sense to it, no purpose. It was a collage of images that, when you finally added them up, didn’t really mean anything. It was a meandering, sometimes intriguing, challenging and ultimately frustrating piece of crap. Well, I hate to break this to you, but “Mulholland Drive”, despite its presence on every top ten critic’s list I have seen, is completely fucked in the head.

The story. What is the story? Good question. I watched the whole movie and I couldn’t tell you. Every so often, I thought that the movie was going somewhere. I thought that there was some grand design behind it all. But I was wrong. The film concerns an amnesiac woman (Lara Harring) and the plucky young actress whose house she invades (Naomi Watts). The woman can only remember that she had been in a car accident on Mulholland Drive. In their attempts to piece together the events she underwent previous to her accident, the story meanders through wheelchair-bound dwarves, spontaneous Spanish speaking, a director named Adam whose wife appears to be getting boffed by Billy Ray Cyrus (I’m not kidding! I swear it’s him!), strange magic/music shows, lesbianism, and a man who is very picky about his espresso. None of it gels into anything remotely resembling sense. It flirts with having a point every so often, but ultimately, the film would rather just go nuts and show you a lot of strange imagery. Watching “Mulholland Drive” is about like taking a ride in a taxi and, just when you’re about to get to your destination, the driver bails out and you have no way of controlling the vehicle. And it’s less fun.

There are moments that are intriguing. There are interesting characters and ideas. In fact, that’s the thing that pissed me off so much about this movie. I cared about these characters. I wanted to know what was happening. I wanted to know what the purpose of it all was. But apparently, I cared more than Lynch did. In the end, David would rather just attempt to shock us and show us some creepy stuff. The film doesn’t even work on that level. More than once toward the end of this film, when I take it I was supposed to be creeped out, I was simply laughing at the ludicrous ineptitude of it all. It was more silly than suspenseful. And the lesbian scene, hot and welcome as it was, had all the point and purpose such a film has in a porno, except that it comes even more out of nowhere.

I could take all this if I thought there was some higher purpose behind it all, if there were some theme I could ponder and explore later. But there isn’t. If there is, I don’t know what the hell it is. I like a movie that challenges my intelligence, but I like this one doesn’t. It simply frustrates my intelligence. Just when I thought the movie did have a point, it did a complete 180 and left me scratching my ass. Maybe there is something there, down deep, very, very deep. But you know what? I have better things to do with my life. Yes, even I do. I don’t need to spend hours on the internet analyzing Lynch’s insane delusions. Thanks anyway. I prefer “The Straight Story” which explores interesting ideas and introduces intriguing characters without ultimately pissing me off.

If this is your sort of thing, then you’ll eat this shit up with a spoon. It isn’t mine. Say that I “didn’t get it”. Say that I’m an idiot. Whatever. I don’t give a shit. I don’t need this aggravation.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2001 at 9:31 pm and is filed under Dale's Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.