Too self-consciously arty by half, or just bad editing?

Rating: 4/10 (13 April 2002)

Look, I like artsy movies as much as anyone, but I didn't find this artistic, or enjoyable, or overwhelmingly complex and hard to understand and in need of three viewings, as so many commentators seem to. I thought the story was quite straightforward once you figured out what was real and what was a dream, and might have just been called, "The Face on the Cutting Room Floor" (thank you, Steve Goodman.) Won't say any more than that, as I don't want to give away its supposed secrets. I will say I find movies in which I can't figure out what's going on until half way through to be annoyingly frustrating, not artistic. "Two for the Road," (Hepburn/Finney) was a complicated story told through multiple backward/forward time jumps, and made perfect sense. "Memento" had a lot of similarities to "Mulholland," but made perfect sense. This movie just felt narcissistic, self-indulgent and badly edited.