**** (out of ****)
Starring Naomi Watts, Laura Elena Herring, Justin Theroux, Ann Miller, and Robert Forster
Directed & written by David Lynch
145 min
2000 R
IMDb sez: “A bright-eyed young actress travels to Hollywood, only to be ensnared in a dark conspiracy involving a woman who was nearly murdered, and now has amnesia because of a car crash. Eventually, both women are pulled into a psychotic illusion involving a dangerous blue box, a director named Adam Kesher, and the mysterious night club Silencio.”
The story goes—and I may muddle this badly—that director David Lynch wanted to do an entire TV series around the “Mulholland Drive” premise, much like “Twin Peaks,” but the network changed its mind and abandoned him with an unaired pilot episode. Undaunted, Lynch shot new footage a year or two later, did some creative editing, and re-vamped the whole thing into his best feature yet. (Close behind are his “The Straight Story” and “The Elephant Man,” although “Lost Highway” and “Wild at Heart” are pretty sweet.)
During my recent viewing of “Mulholland Drive”—only my second—I was more aware that the bulk of the first ninety minutes was shot as a television pilot. This first chunk consists largely of standard shot-reverse shot with adequate-but-dry framing. TV is usually a mix of close shots and medium shots, because compositions with figures any smaller than that strain the eyes on a seventeen-inch screen. Watch when the fictional director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) shows up at The Ranch: a theatrical release would almost certainly have provided a wider establishing shot with Kesher a speck in the frame and menaced by all the open space and shadow.
I remember being surprised by “Mulholland Drive’s” Oscar nomination for director but not for original screenplay; I thought for certain that if it were only going to get one but not the other it would be for writing. If you have a keen eye, you can probably guess which parts of these first ninety minutes were added or re-shot expressly for the theatrical feature. Characters look at things in TV framing, then their point-of-view shots may have been shot much later by a weightless and threatening Steadicam. An early café sequence involving two men in suits sharing a delightfully odd conversation about dreams is so spacey that it couldn't have been part of the TV shoot.
Then at the three-quarter mark we get the footage shot expressly for the feature. Sure there’s nudity and swearing but now the movie looks more like a movie. Characters are smaller in the frame and Lynch’s camera becomes more nimble and not just a window into a TV studio. So some of my admiration for the movie is diminished because if Lynch had known from the start that he was making a feature the first three fourths could have used the same script but would have been more spacey, more disembodied and creepy.
But then that same degree of admiration returns when I realize all the work it took to wrap up all those loose ends years later, to take the broken first chapter of what was to be a long novel and wrap it up as a novella. You may spot the difference between the TV and the movie based on subtle visual texture, but not on anything. “Mulholland Dr.” in no way feels cobbled together. From the work on my own no-budget movie, in which we’ve pieced together script bits written years apart and footage shot with different filters, cameras, etc., I can really respect the ingenuity it must have taken Lynch to pull this off.
“Mulholland” is magnificently atmospheric—the film feels constantly threatening through a use not of only of events that make no sense but from a nearly non-stop low rumble. “Mulholland” has a much to do with dreams and Lynch emphasizes this by giving us a hovering, disembodied Steadicam—it certainly feels like a POV shot, but whose POV? Sometimes it’s a specific character, but at other times we feel like we’re seeing things through the eyes of some kind of floating, malevolent specter. Because of the movie’s over-two-hour runtime, we are forced to identify with this specter, resulting in the feeling that WE are the malevolent force.
Lynch is also not afraid to use sheer blackness, to creep threateningly into absolute shadow and let the theater become lightless. Blackness and the malevolent floating eye are combined in a brilliant sequence in which two characters seem to vanish before our eyes. In much the same way Hitchcock’s camera in “Psycho” wanders purposefully through a freshly uninhabited world after the first murder, so too does Lynch’s camera seem to take on sentience as it moves knowingly away from where those two people used to be, only to finally engulf us in utter darkness.
So, anyway, yeah – one of the best movies of the decade.
Click here for some light interpretation and spoilers.
Finished Sunday, January 28, 2007
Copyright (c) 2007 Friday & Saturday Night
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