David Lynch approaches his movies like a chef obsessed with the intensity of taste.
He reduces the sauce of film down to a pungent, unsettling paste of ominous bewilderment. Lynch’s characters stand looking expectantly down hallways or through doorways, sniffing a distinct odor of dread only slightly leavened by lingering optimism. These battered souls are repulsed by the flavor of their lives so far, yet lured by the scent of mysterious change that might somehow improve their future.
Of course, they’re wrong to entertain any such hope. Things don’t get better in a Lynch movie, they just get reliably more bizarre. What makes a Lynch movie watchable – aside from his impeccable artistic technique – is that he never condemns his beleaguered creations for clinging to hope. He’ll bash them around, drug them senseless, shatter their families, but Lynch knows humans can never wash the taste of longing completely from their mouths.
Lynch’s latest, “Inland Empire,” challenges the audience as often as it tests the endurance of his characters. You thought the elegant “Mulholland Drive” in 2001 was incomprehensible? Good luck here: “Inland Empire” makes the disjointed parallel plots of “Mulholland Drive” look as simple as your average episode of “Matlock.”
Luckily for Lynch, he has the severely underappreciated Laura Dern to anchor most of his plot lines. Co-producing “Inland Empire” with Lynch, Dern revels in the chance to play everything from a faded actress to a steamy adultress to a foul-mouthed prostitute. The main plot line starts with Dern’s Nikki struggling to restart her acting career in a Southern melodrama directed by the deceptively cloying Jeremy Irons.
We reach this plot only after an unexplained scene between unrelated people in an unknown hotel room, and then a stage play where the actors wear rabbit heads and a canned audience laughs at inappropriate lines.
Before she wins her new role, Dern is visited by one of Lynch’s trademark Eccentric Ladies, shot in extreme, unflattering closeup, and uttering a line that speaks for all the scenes to follow: “I can’t seem to remember if it’s today, two days from now, or yesterday.”
Later, in a different character, Dern offers a response of sorts: “I figured one day I’d wake up and figure out what yesterday was about. I’m not too keen on tomorrow. And today is slipping by.”
Lynch’s movies increasingly seem to be obsessed with the artifice of acting, and the danger that those who make up stories for a living will lose touch with reality. Lynch treats his women badly, but loves them to death. Remember the star turn of Naomi Watts in “Mulholland Drive,” going from ingenue to steely actress in one remarkable audition? Dern does the same here, at least three different times, including a line-reading with her Southern-fried co-star in which she turns on the switch of thespian star power in a split-second.
At three hours, “Inland Empire” is self-indulgent by at least 25 minutes. Dern spends too long gazing in terror down those bleak hallways; there’s an entire Polish-based plot line I didn’t even mention because I have no idea what it means.
But I’d watch Lynch’s self-indulgence ahead of most directors’ best moments.
His dodges are eminently artful, and his dedicated chronicling of American seediness, even if a seediness imagined rather than proven, marches on apace.
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at 303-954-1686 or at mbooth@denverpost.com
“Inland Empire”
R for nudity, language, violence, bizarre content|3 hours|EXPERIMENTAL| Written and directed by David Lynch; starring Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, Justin Theroux, Harry Dean Stanton and Julia Ormond|Opens today at Landmark’s Mayan Theater.
