DIRECTOR/SCREENWRITER
David
Lynch
PRODUCERS
Neal Edelstein
Tony Krantz
Michael Polaire
Alain Sarde
Mary Sweeney
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Peter Deming
MUSIC
Angelo Badalamenti
EDITOR
Mary Sweeney
CAST
Justin Theroux (Adam Kesher)
Naomi Watts (Betty Elms)
Laura Elena Harring (Rita)
Ann Miller (Coco)
Robert Forster (Detective McKnight)
Brent Briscoe (Detective Domgaard)
Maya Bond (Aunt Ruth)
Patrick Fischler (Dan)
Michael Cooke (Herb)
Bonnie Aarons (Bum)
Michael J. Anderson (Mr. Roque)
Angelo Badalamenti (Luigi Castigliane)
Dan Hedaya (Vincenzo Castigliane)
Michael Des Barres (Billy)
Billy Ray Cyrus (Gene)
Melissa Crider (Waitress at Winkies)
Monty Montgomery (Cowboy)
Chad Everett (Jimmy Katz)
Rebekah Del Rio (Herself)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 145m
U.S. release: October 19, 2001
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official
website
Other David
Lynch films
reviewed on this website:
- Dune
- Lost
Highway
- The
Straight Story
- Twin
Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
- Wild
at Heart
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David Lynch's Mulholland
Drive was supposed to be an ABC television series, but the
network backed out after Lynch delivered the pilot episode. Given
some French money to turn the pilot into a theatrical film by
shooting new footage to make it self-contained, Lynch, bless
his perverse heart, used it as an opportunity to make it ever
more tangled in Lynchian symbology and mystery. He doesn't even
pretend to bring the film -- or the various subplots designed
for a TV season's worth of exploration -- to any conventional
or even sensible closure.
I don't think David Lynch will
ever work in television again; Mulholland Drive feels
like a vicious slap at ABC (the home of his cult hit series Twin
Peaks) and any other network that would try to tame his wild-at-heart
vision. But I hope his enthusiastic fan base in France and Japan
will keep the wheels greased for more movies (since no American
studio will back him), because Mulholland Drive, oblique
and baffling as it is, is still the only English-language movie
this year to use the film medium to challenge, provoke, arouse,
and confound, often all at once.
Some dislike being confounded.
They will find no solace in the "story," which begins
rather network-ishly, as aspiring actress Betty (Naomi Watts)
and an amnesiac who's named herself "Rita" (Laura Elena
Harring) sift through Los Angeles for clues to Rita's identity.
For a while, that's the film's main throughline; we meet other
characters -- a frustrated, cuckolded movie director (Justin
Theroux), a typical Lynchian Man of Mystery called The Cowboy
(Monty Montgomery), two men in a diner discussing ominous dreams
-- who are neglected or entirely forgotten; Lynch uses them as
divertissements but doesn't bother tying them into the
dominant narrative. It's a bit like the European theatrical version
of the Twin Peaks pilot, wherein the killer was revealed
but subplot threads were left dangling.
Indeed, Mulholland Drive
starts out all-American -- it kicks off with images of jitterbugging,
for God's sake, and employs a classical American mystery arc
-- and then turns on a dime into European territory, complete
with lesbian erotica and freak-out surrealism. At the risk of
being called something or other, I can only applaud the moment
when the movie quite merrily decides to go lesbian ("We're
now into the R-rated portion of the evening," you can almost
hear Lynch say); this director specializes in the beautiful/evil
sweetness of sin, the attentiveness to breath quickened by lust
or dread or both. When lips brush together and hands explore
the undiscover'd country of same-sex flesh, the screen trembles
and burns.
After that, Lynch goes spelunking
in the caves of his own pet obsessions. Rita's identity crisis
is also the film's. As we saw in Lost
Highway, Lynch has a taste for left-brain/right-brain
narrative with no easy connective link -- he wants you to climb
into your own head and finish the work yourself, and so there
are an infinite number of ways to read Mulholland Drive.
I need to see it at least seven more times, armed with
interviews with the notoriously unhelpful Lynch (who refuses
to kill his mysterious babies by dissecting them), preferably
on DVD where Peter Deming's lit-from-within-by-hellflame cinematography
and Angelo Badalamenti's sad, menacing score can work their magic
on me most efficiently and repeatedly.
As moviemaking -- as pure abstract
art writ large -- this is a classic, a thing of dark mystifying
beauty. What actually happens during the last half hour, and
what does it all mean? I really couldn't tell you (yet). Mulholland
Drive demands to be chewed over obsessively, revisited devoutly,
until its secrets unlock themselves -- much as Lynch's characters
(and their creator) circle around a central mystery only to find
an enigma inside. Those who are willing to put that much effort
into a David Lynch film -- or are at least willing to give him
the benefit of the doubt -- will enjoy Mulholland Drive;
those who aren't, won't.
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