A Wondrously Gorgeous Monster Movie

Rating: 9/10 (23 October 2017)

This is a very early film in Lynch's professional career, his 1st major studio production following his much more personal, intimate and outrageously bizarre masterpiece, Eraserhead. That freshman effort is perhaps Lynch's most pure expression of cinematic artistry—a fiercely idiosyncratic, absurdly inscrutable gesture of audio/visual mischievous of the most masterful kind. Contained within Lynch's debut feature length movie can be found the bulk of the sublime ideas and ingenious cinematic techniques which infused all his later films with such shockingly vivid & visceral emotionalism. Eraserhead is such a powerfully effective bit of cinematic wizardry that upon witnessing it—no, upon being assaulted by it!—Mel Brooks was convinced that its mad genius creator had to be the director of the unusually odd film which he was producing, and thus David Lynch was hurled into the gaping, yawning, voracious orifice that is Hollywood film-making.
Luckily, David Lynch had a magnificently talented cast (Anthony Hopkins, John Gielgud, Anne Bancroft, Freddie Jones, and of course a brilliant John Hurt) as well as a superb script (Christopher De Vore, Eric Bergren & David Lynch) with which to fashion his quaint Victorian period piece/archly Gothic nightmare monster movie. The narrative is strikingly concise and terse, almost bleak in its unadorned simplicity, yet more than ample to support the gargantuan mass of barely tolerable pathos which burdens nearly every scene. That's not to say it's a tortuous slog—no, not hardly. The Elephant Man is only as emotionally crushing as David Lynch has astutely calculated we can endure, and it regularly assumes a surprisingly delicate & buoyant demeanor. In other words, it's an intensely disturbing, wonderfully rich & rewarding emotional roller coaster.
Lynch's monster is a ghastly creature dwelling in the darkest, dankest recesses of the human psyche, and it's by dragging us kicking & screaming down to those formidably threatening depths that he's able to then kindly usher us to the shimmering splendor of an equally remote but welcoming inner realm where resides compassion, empathy & genuine humanity.
It seems it's only by directly facing life's most daunting, most ugly, most horrific truths can we hope for any real joy, or at least any relief. That's heavy, isn't it?