It's fun to have your brain melted

Rating: 10/10 (9 October 2001)

I have to say, at the end of this film, I was utterly confounded, mystified, disturbed, fascinated, and it felt as if someone had driven a truck through my brain. However, I truly enjoyed the feeling. I saw "Mulholland Drive", and I was completely involved from beginning to end. Do I understand it? Nah. Is that okay? Yup.
This is definitely Lynch's best film since "Blue Velvet". Many people will be comparing MD to that truly brilliant film, Lynch's magnum opus, and others will doubtless be comparing it to what I believe to be his weakest effort, "Lost Highway". But the fact is, where "LH" was abrasive, murky, unpleasant, and often ridiculous, "MD" is lyrical, subtle, creepy, poignant, terrifying, and quite wonderfully loopy.
We get all of the trademark Lynch stuff: the droning, vibratingly dramatic score, which is remarkably effective and creepy; we also get the syrupy, overdone, deliberately cheesy dramatic scenes (as when a young blonde actress beatifically describes Los Angeles as "Some sort of wonderful dream-land!!!") and the aggro-bizarre moments that seem utterly separate from reality...or at least a reality we might be familiar with.
But what I really loved about this movie was the brilliant way in which Lynch joyfully screws with the collective mind of the audience. He sets up the first 90 minutes of the movie as a straight-ahead, linear Noir-mystery, with two beautiful young women (one an amnesiac car accident victim, the other a naive aspiring actress) trying to figure out the amnesiac's identity. He also introduces several seemingly unrelated subplots--one involving a frustrated young criminal who undergoes a truly hilarious and brilliantly-staged series of mishaps during an otherwise typical murder-heist. Another involving a hip young movie director who is coerced by a pair of Italian gangsters to hire an unknown starlet for the leading role in his next film.
And then there's the ingeniously creepy opening scene where a disturbed young man tells his (shrink?) about the nightmare that has been plaguing him whilst dining at a Denny's like restaurant, only to have the dream begin to come true...
It's best not to reveal anything else. But suffice to say, there are more twists, turns, surprises, fantastic red herrings, McGuffins, and delicious samples of twisted erotica to satisfy any Lynch fan. The film, as I said before, confounded me utterly--but I loved every minute of it. I will always remember certain random images: dribbling espresso, a shiny blue box, a series of blue keys, an ashtray in the shape of a piano, hallucinogenic jitterbugging, Ann Miller's mottled claw reaching into a bowl of walnuts, and a Lynchian blue-haired woman uttering the word "silencio".
Gorgeous, trippy, scary, and fantastically strange..."Mulholland Drive" is 2001's best film thus far. Thanks, Dave! It's been awhile since "Blue Velvet", but you've finally delivered the goods.