David Lynch is the most brilliantly innovative and interesting filmmaker working today, and Mulholland Drive is yet another masterpiece. It is beautiful, ugly, poignant, haunting, hilarious, dark, nightmarish, mesmerizing, thought-provoking, puzzling, and confounding. Is it a horror film? Like all things in the Lynchian universe, the answer is an emphatic: yes and no.
What's the story about? The more proper question is: Is there a story? Again, there is and there isn't.
Mulholland Drive is not so much a story as a series of events, veering off into divergent tangents, surrealistically (but only partially) interconnected, sometimes returning on a Mobius strip in new form, sometimes dropped and forgotten, or lingering on a subconscious level. Welcome to Lynch's dark and beautiful nightmare. You either love it or hate it.
Like Lynch's Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive opens in a hyper-idealized America. A perky all-American girl (from Canada) with stars in her eyes wins a jitterbug contest — 1950s kitsch in a contemporary America permeated with anachronistic sensibilities. She arrives in Los Angeles, seen resplendently through her naive eyes. That's Betty (from Archie comics?) played by Naomi Watts. In Mulholland Drive, Betty's brunette foil is Rita (Laura Harring). Rita hails from L.A. noir. A dark femme fatale riding in the back seat of a car, moving languorously, hypnotically, down Mulholland Drive. Rita's mysterious identity is compounded by her attempted murder. Then a strikingly brutal (and seemingly arbitrary) incident drastically alters the course of events.
As in a nightmare.
Lynch is one of the few filmmakers who can pull off such seeming arbitrariness. His films' narrative subtext, cinematography, art direction, and music create a surreal interconnectedness that fuses events together despite drastic and seemingly arbitrary plot detours.
I don't want to reveal too much. Mulholland Drive should not be spoiled for those who've yet to see it.
After driving down Mulholland Drive, Rita has amnesia. She wanders into Betty's house. Betty — who came to Hollywood to be star — takes Rita under her wing. Like Nancy Drew, Betty is an innocent drawn to adventure. Innocent, because no modern day Nancy Drew would last long in the dark and violent world Betty is set to enter (and Rita, re-enter).
This is a common Lynchian theme: The innocent who is drawn to dark strangers living corrupt lives under the Disney-fied surface of Americana. (It is tempting to see Lynch, raised in Montana, as that innocent.)
In Mulholland Drive, Lynch (through Betty) pokes underneath Hollywood's glitter. Naturally, we find lies, corruption, power plays, egos, and exploitation. The pain and heartbreak beneath Hollywood glitter is an old target, extending back to the similarly titled Sunset Boulevard. Yet remarkably, Lynch breathes starling new vigor into this well-trod tale.
Article comments
1 - Jules Alder
"David Lynch is the most brilliantly innovative and interesting filmmaker working today, and Mulholland Drive is yet another masterpiece."
I'm a Lynch fan since Dune but this statement arouses my curiosity. There are a lot of innovative, interesting directors out there, and at least one I can think of who's, hands down, better than my man David: Pedro Almodovar.
Of course, this is highly opinionated, but did you mean American?
2 - richard
this would have been a better review if other than talking about lynch, some words were given to commenting on the brilliant performance of naomi watts as betty & diane. a few film critics actually said this was not only a lynch's film, but also a naomi watts' film.
3 - Thomas M. Sipos
I meant the most innovative and interesting that I've seen. And yes, it's subjective to an extent.
I also believe that Meat Loaf is the greatest living singer of our day. Not everyone would say so.
Naomi Watts? Yes, she was good. But she was nowhere near as good an actress in The Ring, nor in that Lift remake. Good, but nowhere near what she did in Mulholland Drive. Makes me think that Lynch had something to do with her performance.
4 - Jules Alder
I'd be more inclined to say that the writing had more to do with her performance than the direction. That tends to make the vast difference between good acting and bad. A good director can enhance, sometimes, but can't, more often than not, extract a stellar performance from a cut-rate one. If the writing's there, all else tends to follow, and she can act just fine.
Huckabees, a comedy with less motivation than Mulholland, showed some range, and let's not forget the mild dialect barrier. Since she always has to worry about her accent, that adds a dimension to her acting that American actresses don't have to worry about.
Meat Loaf. That's funny.
5 - richard
aren't this a review of mulholland drive, NOT the ring nor the shaft? if so, why not her oscar-nominated film 21 grams, or the universally praised king kong? if you were such a lynch-ist and could only talk about lynch and nothing else in this review, you should have known that lynch said he had to thank naomi for nailing every scene in the film for him. i also like lynch but the success of mulholland drive was not entirely his, it was partly watts'.
6 - Jules
I'm probably going to step in it here, but whatever. Lynch has been, for many of his films, a horrible writer. I think that while his thanking of Naomi Watts was probably in earnest, that what he didn't realize was that a lot of actors just couldn't 'nail' a role that lacked motivations, obstacles, objectives, etc.
But this? This was his best writing effort of his non-linear films. (Personally, "the straight story" is high quality stuff, even if the plot's thin.) One of his few films where an actor could actually form a believable, consistent character.
What David didn't realize, perhaps, was that he had improved.
7 - Thomas M. Sipos
Watts also owes something to the context of the story (the whole writing and direction), and to the Badalamenti's music score.
Take away that music and show that lesbian scene out of context of the film, and it's likely to look like an outtake from a cheap porn film.