amazing.

Rating: 10/10 (6 January 2002)

There's something brewing just beneath the surface of every scene in Mulholland Drive, and it isn't the usual Lynch weirdness. Sure, that's there in spades; we are treated to scenes of bizarre inexplicable characters doing bizarre inexplicable things again and again. There's the powerful movie mogul who doesn't like his espresso, and so spits it into a napkin, complete with wretching sounds. There's the crazy next-door neighbor, who appears to have an insight that no one else has, calling up remembrances of The Log Lady from Twin Peaks. There's a cowboy who shows up to give a cryptic instruction that never quite pays off, then leaves the film. And there are symbols - a blue box, a key, a phone, a dead body.
Those are touches that make this a recognizably Lynchian film, but they are not what make it great. Unlike the flawed stylistic masterpieces Wild at Heart and Blue Velvet, or the impenetrable and infuriating Lost Highway, Lynch has quite a bit more up his sleeve this time. Mulholland Drive, you see, almost makes perfect sense.
Well, almost. Everything is in doubt, open to interpretation, and sure to fuel more than a few heated conversations. But something actually happens in Mulholland Drive, something that drives the movie from a to b, even though it doesn't happen in that order.
It would be unfair to say what that is, and the movie requires a second viewing to piece it together in any way that (almost) makes sense. But the craft exhibited here, the moral center that the movie has, the carefully thought-out dream logic, easily make this Lynch's best film, and the best film of 2001. For once, we can clearly see Lynch making a movie he loves and wants to say something with, instead of some dismissible piece of trashy modern art. He has finally gone from being a filmmaker who invites comparisons to Bunuel and Godard to being one who earns them.
Laura Harring plays the film's voluptuous, nameless heroine. We see an attempt on her life turn suddenly into a car accident, leaving her would-be murderers dead, and her without a memory. She stumbles down a famous hill overlooking Los Angeles, and finds refuge in what she thinks is an abandoned apartment.
Young, wide-eyed, and droolingly idealistic Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) steps off of a plane from nowheresville into LAX, and on to her aunt's apartment, where she finds a woman in the shower. The woman says her name is Rita, but in truth, she has gotten the name off of a movie poster for Gilda. Betty sympathizes with Rita's predicament, and sets out, in a manner that more than a little suggests Nancy Drew, to find out who she is.
Meanwhile, a hip young director (Justin Theroux) broods over a long conference table, angry that two strange and powerful men have just told him in a non-negotiable way who to cast in his next film. He goes outside and smashes the men's car. Then he drives home, only to find his wife in bed with the pool man (Billy Ray Cyrus, in a hilariously understated performance). He does what any man would do. He gets his wife's jewelry box, and fills it with paint.
But back to Rita and Betty. Rita, it seems, has a great deal of cash in her purse, along with a strange blue metal box for which there is no key. She finds a phone number, and calls what might be her own home. Someone named Diane Selwyn answers. Or is that just a name she got off of a waitress's nametag?
If all this sounds like bad, hokey noir, it is and it isn't. One of the film's pleasures is the way it plays with familiar film devices (the amnesia, the cash, the `mystery') and eventually turns them into something far more nightmarish.
To tell more would be to spoil the movie's surprises, but without giving away too much, two-thirds in, the film and its whole logic are turned on its head. Betty becomes someone else, Rita becomes someone with a name, the director turns out to know them both, and it's all somehow tied together by a `cowboy' with a truly silly getup and a menacing look about him. Lynch even finds time for the fleshiest sex seen ever to see the inside of a multiplex.
The movie's theme is Hollywood itself. Lynch has, in effect, made his version of The Player, thumbing his nose at the very establishment that releases his work. It's not The Player, though, not by a long shot. Lynch would never dare to make a movie that is anything less than completely weird.
In the end, we are left comparing the Betty we saw step off the plane at the beginning of the film, full of wonder and hope, and the `Betty' we see at the end of the film, completely broken. In between is Hollywood, Lynch is saying, that comic mish-mash of broken dreams and over-realized ones, poverty and affluence, bad actors and good ones.
For Lynch to take on the town that has for so long ignored and hated him, in his own style, with his own perfect movie, is the kind of `auteur director makes good' story that the Independent Film Channel loves to trump-up. It may not be exactly true in Lynch's case, because he has made some pretty bad movies, worthy of derision. But he has never made an inept or stupid movie, and to see Mulholland Drive is to realize why this is. Trashy, he may be, but he's sure as hell an artist.