One of Lynch's best films

Rating: 9/10 (26 January 2008)

David Lynch's finest film, alongside with perhaps Mulholland Drive. John Hurt, under tons of makeup, stars as David Merrick, the real-life grotesquely deformed individual of Victorian England that was better known as The Elephant Man. Merrick is the virtual slave of a brutish man (a great performance of Freddie Jones) that parades him as a carnival freak until he is rescued by the sensitive doctor Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins). Treves decides to put Merrick in a hospital room, winning over the initial skepticism of its director, John Gielgud. In the hospital, Merrick will start to talk for the first time, begin to regain his dignity, and eventually will become a curiosity of high society before his premature death. Shot in a delicate and expressionist black and white, the only flaw in the movie might be the performance of Ann Bancroft (producer Mel Brooks's wife) as a stage actress interested in Merrick's life. Except for the surreal opening and closing scenes (in which Merrick is born and dies, respectively), here Lynch is relatively restrained, opting for a style that could be called poetic realism. The film earned eight Oscar nominations in all, but left that race empty-handed, an earlier indication that Lynch's films would not be the typical Academy material.