Mulholland Drive: B

Mulholland Drive: B Current mood: confused Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities
David Lynch is famous for being one of the few remaining directors completely willing to entertain his slightest fancy (be it even at the sacrifice of the audience's worthy attention). Such an attribute has helped him greatly with the creation of such things as Blue Velvet and the television cult phenom Twin Peaks. Here too, in Mulholland Drive, Lynch waves his wild brand of imagination like a wand hoping to cast his spell on us so strong that we won't notice that he has your card up his sleeve. I was reminded of this feeling over and over again watching Mulholland Drive. There are scenes of such rapt power that I was awed...and there are those that will leave you not only mystified but vengefully frustrated. But perhaps I should start at the beginning...

A woman in a black cocktail dress (Laura Elena Harring, an actress who really could only stand still and look pretty) is riding home in her limo when, suddenly, her drive tries to kill her. He fails, mostly due to the fact that they slam into an oncoming car, and the woman escapes sans memory up into the hills of Los Angeles (presumably, Lynch would have us believe, attracted by the glittering lights). There she meets Betty (Naomi Watts), a soon-to-be actress staying in Aunt Ruth's apartment. With Betty's help the women names herself Rita, off of a Gilda poster, and they set out to solve the Mystery. Sounds pretty linear right?

Wrong.

What ensues in their quest I can only classify in quick doses: a crippled dwarf (Michael J. Anderson) runs a black-tie mob, a hideous (and hideously terrifying) man sits behind the wall behind a well-lit diner, a movie director (Justin Theroux) is threatened by the dwarf's mob over control of his movie, and an underworld enforcer known as The Cowboy (Monty Montgomery) maintains a tight grip on an enthralling persona. Oh and Betty and Rita go through all sorts of Nancy Drew by way of Hitchcock scenarios to unravel just exactly who Rita is.

As I mentioned before there are moments of pop poetry genius, pure Lynchian freak-show magic. For example: Betty auditions with an aging matinee star and shocks the room and the audience by acing her role as a dirty dirty girl, then there is the after-hours club "Silencio" in which a women sings to the audience a well known pop song in spanish and collapses right at her climax...leaving us to the realization that the entire thing was lip syched. This later moment though signals the downward spiral of an otherwise enjoyable creepy pulp-noir. As Rita is left to open the blue box of personality and slide down into the rabbit hole of David Lynch's mind you can actually feel the entire movie go to hell. What remains is one pretty good impression of a flashing David Mamet card trick, a bloated metaphysical theory on identity, and a shiveringly good art thriller. I only wish then that the film had tried as hard to make sense as it did to astound. If only.