credit: www.impawards.com
Director:
David Lynch
Cast:
Laura Dern .Nikki Grace
Jeremy Irons. Kingsley Stewart
Justin Theroux. Devon Berk
Harry Dean Stanton. Freddie Howard
David Lynch is a name that has always been synonymous with strange. One need only look at his first film Eraserhead to get a glimpse of his disturbed view. As he grew as a filmmaker his strangeness grew into a palatable format giving us such great films as Blue Velvet and Wild At Heart. While strange at least his films were coherent. With Lost Highway Lynch began to delve into the world of incoherency. Highway made the audience think, but at least there was something to think about. With Lynch’s latest endeavor, Inland Empire, he has completely left the ideas of “narrative” and “coherency” behind.
So this big question is: What is Inland Empire about? That’s easy, it’s the story of something. It’s about this woman who. No, sorry. I have no idea what this movie was about. And there in lies the biggest, of many, problems with this two hour and forty minute torture device Lynch calls a film. Lynch teases in the beginning with the semblance of story. Laura Dern plays Nikki Grace, a married actress trying to make a comeback. The vehicle for this, she hopes, is a film directed by Kingsley Stewart (Irons) and co-starring Devon Berk (Theroux). The film is about two married people having an affair; meanwhile Nikki’s husband threatens Devon not to even think about his wife or there will be consequences.
Therein lies the end of the story. Forty-five minutes is all you get. The rest of the two hours is a collage of incoherent images and dialog that maybe makes sense in Lynch’s head but really won’t to anyone else. Nikki is talking to a man in a dark dank room about her troubled past one minute then she’s in a room with a bunch of other women showing off their breasts the next. Then a different girl is watching TV crying. On the TV three people in bunny suits (one being Naomi Watts) talk complete nonsense accompanied by a laugh track. Then the women Nikki was talking to are doing a poorly choreographed dance sequence to Loco-Motion. There’s also a bunch of characters completely unrelated to Nikki talking in Polish.
Some of this might have been interesting if not for a couple things. First off, it goes on way too long. You see the images on the screen and as individual images they makes sense. But your mind tries to connect all the images and it just starts to hurt. This goes on for over two hours and after a while you just go numb. Your mind shuts down because it can’t take any more. There were some interesting things happening there towards the end but by that point it just didn’t matter. Also, Lynch shot this film digitally, but it doesn’t look that way. It looks something closer to a film shot by amateurs.
It’s like somebody kidnapped David Lynch and replaced him with a no talent film student. Do you remember that scene in Ghost World when Illeana Douglas shows her art class her pretentious film and she keeps repeating “Mirror, father, mirror?”
Inland Empire is kind of like that but not funny and almost 3 hours long. The whole film has that pretentious “look how cool and arty I am” feel to it. Lynch shot this movie without a script, as he’d write each scene just before shooting it, and that is utterly apparent throughout. Avoid this film.
