BEST OF 2001

Rating: 10/10 (23 April 2002)

[MAJOR SPOILERS -- POSSIBLE EXPLANATION OF THE PLOT]
Created at 3:00am in the morning, upon 3rd view of the movie.
If we are to make sense of this movie (which I think is possible despite some critics' reviews) we have to separate the changes in the first (up to the point when the blue box is opened) and second half of the movie and call them either facts/realities or lies/illusions. In addition, we must understand which parts are relevant in our analysis of the plot and which facts are not so relevant. So here is one explanation that can account for the majority of scenes in the movie and is the one that you undoubtedly heard: everything up to the point of the blue box drop is a dream. Yes, this explains a lot but we have to be careful here. If something or somebody appears in a person's dream, does this render all the facts in the dream false? Absolutely no. Like any other dream, the dream in the movie contains both facts and fiction; it also can take a fact, a real event, relationship, names and even words and turn it into something new and unreal, out of place and extraordinary. Like any other dream, it can indulge in wishful thinking making one's reality appear in a better light than it really is. In short, a dream can make whatever it wishes to make. Here I have to borrow Ebert's words that can better convey what I mean: "Like real dreams, it does not explain, does not complete its sequences, lingers over what it finds fascinating, dismisses unpromising plotlines." (Ebert) For example, take the early scene in which a man sitting in a restaurant tries to explain to his friend the dream, in which a man seen by him through a wall scares the living crap out of him. Do these people appear later in the movie? One of them does. Are they by themselves relevant to the plot? Not really but the circumstances that surround them are. You'll see my point later on.
Now let me try to explain some of the scenes in the movie. The first scene in which Rita rides in a limo is Diane's dream. This claim is supported by the improbable survival of Rita that leaves her not only alive but conveniently vulnerable (for Diane) and having no memory of who she really is. Also, notice that there were two cars that caused the crash, two for each lane. One did crash into the limo but what happened to the other one? They didn't stop to see what happened and help possible survivors? Remember, like every dream it doesn't explain, it doesn't need to be logical and thorough, that's how our brains work while dreaming. The dream simply threw that second car out of the picture and forgot about it.
Where am I going with this? Well, I believe that all characters in the first half of the movie while not fictional occupy different/fictional positions and play fictional or slightly different roles than in the second half, in which in my opinion they reveal their true selves. Still, it seems that every character in the first part (the dream part) met, saw or knew Diane in the real, second part. This happens in our dreams too. A character that we have met only once or twice in our lives or the one that we've seen just for a split second (the cowboy in the Adam's party scene in the second half) can take center stage in our dreams. This explains how the mob guy whom Diane saw at Adam's part towards the end of the movie is given a relatively prominent role in her dream - he is seen as the major force behind the campaign to pressure the director to accept Camilla for the role in his film.
I regret that I don't have space to account for every little detail but here's my take in short: Diane, who is completely in love with Camilla, hires a hit man to kill her when she realizes that Camilla will never be hers. She pays the killer the money that she inherited from her aunt and is given a blue key. The key may be a metaphor but is likely to open something that Diane can open to see evidence of Camilla's death (like her watch, which we see on the ground next to the blue box). We then see her at home, besieged by the guilt, represented by the old lady and old man, the very first people she met when she came to L.A. At this point Camilla is likely dead; Diane hears her screams in the head. She can't take it any more and commits suicide. The entire first half of the movie is perhaps the last thing that she sees before passing away (the old "the entire life flashes before her eyes" cliché) or is her dream but earlier before the cowboy (an illusion) comes to wake her up. All scenes in the first half of the movie involving the director, the mob guys, the guy in the wheelchair and the killer are most likely a dream too. Take what happened to the director, for example. Diane upon hearing that Adam and Camilla are about to be engaged/married (not explicitly said in the movie), develops such hatred toward Adam, who stole her love, that she sees Adam in her dream as having the most improbable bad day - he loses his job, wife, money, gets beat up and is harassed by a mob. Remember, dreams can linger in wishful thinking and create whatever they want to create. In other words, the only real Adam in the movie is at the party. We can use the aforementioned theory to account for pretty much every scene and fact in the movie.