Mulholland Drive

[IronParrot]

Anyone else seen it?

Review coming soon - that is, as soon as I can make heads or tails of what I think about this movie...

[IronParrot]

Here's my review...

SUMMARY

A woman who assumes the name Rita (Laura Elena Harring) survives a car accident, with no memory of who she is. Betty (Naomi Watts), an aspiring actress, tries to help Rita recover her identity. It gets a little weirder from there on, but this is about as much as I can say without spoiling, well, everything.

RECOMMENDED FOR:

Anyone who's up to the challenge of figuring out what the hell is going on.

REVIEW

If you come out of Mulholland Drive with some sort of inkling as to what you just saw, you'll probably love it. If you come out of it totally confused, find out what sense somebody else might have made of it - and then, you'll probably love it. If you come out of it confused and with no intention of understanding it, you'll probably want your money back.

But in any case, the film is worth a shot for anyone who has the will or capability to actually think while watching a movie.

On the upside, Mulholland Drive is a surreal, amnesiac thriller of a complexity that makes the likes of Brazil and Memento seem rather straightforward, and should be remedial to all the audiences that were manipulated into thinking that The Sixth Sense was actually clever. On the downside, by the end of it all, the film is a jumble of clues and connections that are left to the audience to piece together, with not even a semblance of an actual solution. This ambiguity is in many ways a hallmark of the film's ingenuity, but is also the work's major pitfall, as it gets so wrapped up in its own elaborate cleverness that it fails to truly connect with the audience to the fullest extent. The end result is a film that can only be regarded as brilliant after the credits roll, in an entirely retrospective fashion. Even then, there are a multitude of possible theories regarding what actually happens in the movie, which make one question whether or not director David Lynch had any specific solution in mind. In the end, Mulholland Drive is a myriad of puzzle pieces that never assemble themselves, and many audiences will undoubtedly be too frustrated by overwhelming complexity to put the pieces together.

However, amidst all the apparent incoherence and misdirection that permeates throughout the movie, particularly in its final act, the finished product is still an extraordinary experiment that exploits cinema as a storytelling medium to its fullest. The film is commendable for its paranoid atmosphere of dark shadows and a chilling score by Angelo Bandalamenti, which allows it to become a rare thriller that actually thrills with its gloom. If anything, Mulholland Drive is proof that film noir is not quite dead, just comatose.

Memorable performances from the leads create memorable characters in the film. Most notable is Naomi Watts, whose Betty initially comes off as an overly spunky gal working from a detractingly perky script, but then detours into a dynamism and range that meander through countless emotions across the spectrum. This is particularly clear in an audition scene where Betty has to come off as a truly talented actress; it takes one to portray one.

There is little else to say about Mulholland Drive. There is no doubt that it is an intelligently structured film, but often far too inaccessibly elitist in its intelligence for the average movie audience. Not everyone will appreciate that it is a mystery novel with the pages of the epilogue ripped out, though some will certainly rise with glee to the challenge of eternally discussing its intricacies.