December 6, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'INLAND EMPIRE'
The Trippy Dream Factory of David Lynch
By MANOHLA DARGIS
There are, in the movies, few places creepier to spend time than in
David Lynch's head. It is a head where the wild things grow, twisting
and spreading like vines, like fingers, and taking us in their
captive embrace. Over the last three decades these wild things have
laid siege to us even as they have mutated: the deformed baby
of "Eraserhead" evolving into the anguished distortions of "The
Elephant Man," the Reagan-era surrealism of "Blue Velvet," the serial
home invasion in "Twin Peaks" and the meta-cinematic
masterpiece "Mulholland Drive," a dispatch from that smog-choked
boulevard of broken dreams called Hollywood.
Mr. Lynch revisits that bewitched boulevard in the extraordinary,
savagely uncompromised "Inland Empire," his first feature in five
years, his first shot in video and one of the few films I've seen
this year that deserves to be called art. Dark as pitch, as noir, as
hate, by turns beautiful and ugly, funny and horrifying, the film is
also as cracked as Mad magazine, though generally more difficult to
parse. I'm still trying to figure out what the giant talking rabbits
which seem to be living in Ralph Kramden's apartment, as redesigned
by Edward Hopper have to do with the weepy Polish woman who may be
a whore or merely lost or, because this is a David Lynch film (after
all), probably both.
As the Good Witch of the North says, it's always best to start at the
beginning and, so, once upon a time, an actress, Nikki Grace (a
dazzling, fearless Laura Dern), receives a stranger (Grace Zabriskie,
hilarious, unsettling) into her home. The unnamed visitor, a new
neighbor with bulging eyes and an East European accent, engages in
some gossip ("I hear you have a new role") before delivering two
brief parables that hint at the weirdness to follow. When the boy
went out into the world to play, the stranger says, evil was born and
followed the boy. When the girl went out to play, though, she got
lost in the marketplace, which pretty much sums up what happens to
most pretty actresses in Hollywood.
Like "Mulholland Drive," which this new film resembles like an evil
twin, "Inland Empire" involves an attractive blond actress who
tumbles down rabbit holes inside rabbit holes inside rabbit holes.
In "Mulholland Drive," the actress finally chokes on the acrid smoke
that billows out of the dream factory, imagining herself in a
starring role before gasping her last breath in what looks like a
Nathanael West rooming house of horrors. They shoot actresses, don't
they? Yes, they do, and usually before the clincher. Mostly, though,
actresses just fade away, undone by wrinkles and the industry's lack
of interest in anything female that doesn't jiggle. By contrast, in
his strange way, Mr. Lynch loves women, or at least their
representations. And he gives them terribly tasty roles.
Few are tastier or finally more terrible than the role of Nikki
Grace, whose porn-star name suggests tacky self-invention and a
straight-to-video career. Soon after entertaining her foreign-
accented visitor, Nikki, who looks to be in her mid-30s, is
rehearsing for a new film called "On High in Blue Tomorrows" with a
director, Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons, expertly blending unction
with ego), and her co-star, Devon Berk (Justin Theroux, butched-up as
a neo-greaser). A romantic melodrama, this preposterously titled film
involves Susan Blue and Billy Side, nattily dressed Southerners who
flirt with indirection on the veranda while an almost-unrecognizable
Julia Ormond plays the other woman, kind of. In time, this film-
within-a-film casts an enveloping shadow over Nikki, leading her real
and reel lives to blur.
The reeler it gets, the weirder it gets. Nikki or Susan or perhaps
both enter another story that resembles a tawdrier version of "On
High in Blue Tomorrows." In this unvarnished version of the film-
within-the-film, Susan spends a lot of time in a sinister house with
some half-dozen women who appear to be whores. The whores chew the
fat and their naughty lower lips, lounge on a street in a snowy
Polish city in what appears to be the 1930s and end up laughing on a
nostalgically seedy modern Hollywood Boulevard. A couple also pop up
in a suburban backyard that looks like what you would expect to find
in the bleak Southern California region of the larger film's title.
Most dance while lip-synching "The Loco-Motion."
The easiest way into "Inland Empire" is through the grand mansions,
derelict houses, ominous hallways and grubby back alleys that Nikki,
Susan, the big rabbits and the whores inhabit. Each room brings new
moods, visual textures, threats and sometimes even a crime, as well
as such familiar Lynchian flourishes as a buzzing electric light and
velvety red curtains. The film shows a small room in which the
weeping Polish woman watches a television set flooded with static.
This room is replaced by another, more claustrophobic one crowded
with floral designs, in which a woman and a man settle what sounds
like a money-for-sex transaction; this is, in turn, is replaced by a
lavishly appointed, gilt-edged room of the sort found in European
palaces and museums.
How Nikki and the other characters wind up in these rooms how, for
instance, the pampered blonde ends up talking trash in a spooky, B-
movie office is less important than what happens inside these
spaces. In "Inland Empire," the classic hero's journey has been
supplanted by a series of jarringly discordant scenes, situations and
setups that reflect one another much like the repeating images in the
splintered hall of mirrors at the end of Orson Welles's "Lady From
Shanghai." The spaces in "Inland Empire" function as way stations,
holding pens, states of minds (Nikki's, Susan's, Mr. Lynch's), sites
of revelation and negotiation, of violence and intimacy. They are
cinematic spaces in which images flower and fester, and stories are
born.
Each new space also serves as a stage on which dramatic entrances and
exits are continually being made. The theatricality of these
entrances and exits underscores the mounting tension and frustrates
any sense that the film is unfolding with the usual linear logic.
Like characters rushing in and out of the same hallway doors in a
slapstick comedy, Nikki/Susan keeps changing position, yet, for long
stretches, doesn't seem as if she were going anywhere new. For the
most part, this strategy works (if nothing else, it's truer to
everyday life than most films), even if there are about 20 minutes in
this admirably ambitious 179-minute film that feel
superfluous. "Inland Empire" has the power of nightmares and at times
the more prosaic letdown of self-indulgence.
In an interview published while this film was in production, Mr.
Lynch said he shot "Inland Empire" without a final screenplay, which
is easy to believe. Like the surrealist practice of automatic
writing, the film feels as if it could have been made in a trance,
dredged up from within. Then again, this is a filmmaker who probably
doesn't need to tap his unconscious to let loose his demons; one
suspects they are lurking right there in the open. Even when his
images are flooded with bright Southern California light, danger
hovers, suggestively buzzing. No one makes that caressing light seem
so dark, so frightening, perhaps because few American filmmakers dare
to peel back the surface of things to show us what squirms beneath.
"Inland Empire" isn't a film to love. It is a work to admire, to
puzzle through, to wrestle with. Its pleasures are fugitive, even
frustrating. The first time I saw it, I was repulsed by the shivers
of Lynchian sadism, a feeling doubtless informed by my adoration of
the far more approachable, humanistic "Mulholland Drive." On second
viewing, though, "Inland Empire" seemed funnier, more playful and
somehow heartfelt. Certainly, there is nothing but love in Ms. Dern's
performance, which is as much a gift to us as to the director who has
given this actress her greatest roles. It's easy to get lost in a
David Lynch film, but Ms. Dern and her amazing rubber-band mouth,
which laughs like the sun and cries us a river, proves a magnificent
guide.
[Stop her before she writes again!]
http://tinyurl.com/yk38j5
