Rating: 5 out of 5
Surrealist auteur David Lynch spent twenty years polarizing audiences worldwide. Some call him crazy, some call him the Renaissance man of modern American filmmaking. With 2001's Mulholland Drive, recognized by many as his magnum opus, his unique vision is more wonderfully entrancing than ever. Essentially a cross between Sunset Boulevard and Eyes Wide Shut, the film has a fascinating formlessness, a dreamlike mystery that keeps us on our toes but with nothing to stand on.
The central character, if she could be described so, is a young aspiring actress named Betty Elms (Naomi Watts). The unnaturally perky and innocent Betty arrives in Los Angeles and moves into an apartment run by her aunt, where she finds a frightened amnesiac (Laura Elena Harring) who wandered into town and took refuge in the apartment after a freak car accident saved her from being murdered. The woman introduces herself as Rita, taking the name from a Rita Hayworth poster in the apartment. Betty decides to help Rita rediscover her identity, and what results is a seemingly straightforward plot that starts off as a Nancy Drew-esque detective story and transforms before our eyes into a dark, complex thriller, weaving around us a web of uncertainty and agony.
Intertwined with the Betty and Rita narrative are distantly related vignettes, featuring a host of bizarre characters from a strangely omnipotent dwarf who gives orders from a wheelchair (Michael J. Anderson) to a possible apparition known as The Cowboy (Lafayette Montgomery). There is another major character, perhaps the only consistent one: a likeable but arrogant, down-on-his-luck director named Adam (Justin Theroux), who is left by his wife and pressured by the mob to cast a specific female lead in his new film.
This movie is endlessly captivating, a hypnotic and haunting film that is daring for both the viewer and the creator. Lynch takes the quintessential elements of the film noir and ever so subtly turns them on their heads. Each scene starts off as blatantly stereotypical, but slowly morphs into a mesmerizing, often chilling moment of horror or passion. At first we feel like we can see through Lynch's tricks, but soon we are completely under his spell. And, an equally important achievement, the scene doesn't lose its effectiveness when we snap out of it. We smile at ourselves for falling into it, but never forget the feeling of being lost in the moment.
This process is reflected in the character of Betty. Naomi Watts, in her breakthrough and probably best performance, is beyond enchanting. She becomes an emotional shape-shifter, at the mercy of the script early on but eventually able to bend and contort the film's tone at her whim. The scene where she auditions for a role in a movie is as unexpectedly spellbinding to us as it is to the other characters. We get the feeling that even Lynch is speechless behind the camera. Then she takes the baffling later scenes that would otherwise be undecipherable, and fills them with tragic, devastating anguish.
They say that the best mysteries are a pleasure to unravel, and are meant to be presented for us to do so. Mulholland Drive is David Lynch asking, "What's so great about ending up with a handful of string?" He wants us to be confused, he wants us to ask our own questions. Questions like, "Can the people in our dreams have dreams of their own?" The films offers no answers, only more mystifying prompts. It is wide open for interpretation, leaving us to discern what, if anything, is reality. Perhaps it features parallel universes, perhaps an anomaly in time, or perhaps it is a touching fantasy conjured up out of sorrow. In any case, this is an absorbingly serpentine film, one of the most breathtaking and memorable of the 2000s, layered with perplexing surrealism, pervasive emotion, and terrifying beauty.
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