Inland Empire: A woman in trouble
Wednesday 14 February @ 16:04:12 |
  by MAX SPARBER
It's something of a cliché to describe a film as dreamlike. The adjective is misused in much the way "surreal" is misused, as a generalized term for some artistic strangeness that we don't have a precise descriptive language for. But, to properly discuss the new David Lynch film "Inland Empire," we must begin in the world of dreams. And, before we begin the discussion, I must caution readers that this is not to suggest the events of "Inland Empire" are meant to be interpreted as a dream. There is a great tendency to approach Lynch's most recent films, particularly "Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Drive," as though they were baffling but solvable mysteries. Some of this is Lynch's fault: His films often mimic--and grotesquely satirize--the language of crime films, mysteries and horror tales. Lynch has made his share of films that follow fairly conventional narrative patterns, albeit idiosyncratically, but most of us got to know Lynch as a result of 1986's "Blue Velvet," and, with his other films from the '80s, he seemed a filmmaker who brought art-house techniques to bleak or fantastical cinematic genres. But that wasn't Lynch, not really. Lynch got his start as a visual artist, incorporating filmic images into sculptures, such as 1966's "Six Figures Getting Sick," in which animated, distorted, puking creatures were projected onto a sculpted screen.
With his troika of recent noir-based films--"Lost Highway," "Mulholland Drive" and "Inland Empire"--Lynch has, step by step, been rejecting formal film conventions, and "Empire," in particular, represents perhaps the most radical break from Lynch's work in the '80s and '90s. Although the film begins with a sense of story, in which a film crew sets out to re-make a movie whose previous production was interrupted by the brutal murder of its stars, Lynch soon all but abandons that plotline. And as he does so, he also abandons any narrative sensibility, any consistent sense of character, and even abandons chronology. He replaces these with another sort of storytelling, and one that has rarely been successfully attempted onscreen: The film takes on the narrative techniques that our mind uses to tell us stories as we sleep. The movie progresses with the strange logic of a dream, which I will detail in a moment, but first I must introduce the film's main character, around whom the tale unwinds.
Laura Dern, an actress who has often seemed on the periphery of mainstream Hollywood, occasionally providing undistinguished lead performances in films such as "Jurassic Park," sometimes providing oddly fragile performances in non-mainstream films, is the linchpin of this film. It is impossible to overstate Dern's importance in the movie, which she co-produced. Lynch began shooting without a completed script, and he fully explored the improvisational possibilities of shooting on digital video, sometimes writing scenes moments before they were to be lensed. It would be easy to get lost in this process, but Dern is not so much a cast member as a co-collaborator. There are tales in medicine of patients who have lost their identities and created new ones whole cloth, with complex backstories, all improvised on the spot, and Dern seems to have approached this film as a challenge to do something similar. Her character, initially an actress named Nikki Grace who lives in a ornate and outdated Hollywood mansion, spies on her Polish (and perhaps criminal) husband while she makes a seamy gothic film with the title "On High in Blue Tomorrows." But as she begins an affair with her leading man (Justin Theroux, making the most of his oversized, expressively sweeping eyebrows), her identity fractures as her new lover calls her by the name of her onscreen character.
 And that's it, folks. We're perhaps 25 minutes into a three-hour movie, and Dern will never recapture any real sense of place, time or identity. Instead, just as in a dream, she constantly sheds and takes on identities, often as a Hollywood streetwalker with a retinue of flighty, menacing hookers who are given to impromptu song and dance numbers. The world is taken over by long alleyways and previously unseen back doors, fraught with menace, that seem to telescope endlessly backward, so that Dern might pass through a door in a ramshackle Southern California home (presumably in the Inland Empire of the film's title) and emerge in Prague just in time to witness a murder that took place years earlier. In this way, time is bent as well--at several key moments, she stumbles into scenes that have already taken place in the film. Dern attacks each of these scenes with gusto, completely immersed in Lynch's dream logic approach that imbues seemingly innocent images, such as a fish in a fish bowl, with a surfeit of emotive power.
This film will inspire a lot of criticism--it invites it, as there is an element of sadism to Lynch's technique, in which he repeatedly sets in motion what seem to be the makings of a narrative, or even an explanation, and then simply abandons it. His skill at creating scenes of dread is nearly unparalleled, and he repeatedly uses this skill to make an otherwise insipid sequence, such as climbing a staircase, unendurably suspenseful. But, just as Jane Austin did in her gothic satire "Northanger Abbey," these scenes are all built up with no payoff. I suspect that on second viewing these scenes will seem prankish--reports from viewers who have seen the film more than once seem to indicate that the film seems much warmer and funnier on repeated viewing, which is often the case with Lynch. But it must be said that there is some exceptionally poetic writing in the film, particularly in a long monologue Dern offers in her streetwalker persona, delivered to a disinterested man with an oversized, pitted face and lopsided wire-rim glasses. She tells of growing up in a town that had gone mad from noxious fumes produced by a nearby chemical plant, and of instances of sexual violence that resulted. It's a savage piece of writing, filled with pathos and unexpectedly piquant turns of phrase, all written in a hardscrabble, ill-educated vernacular. Dern tackles it with absolute conviction, and it is her performance that makes the film something more than a fascinatingly unbalanced artistic experiment. She creates the film's emotional center, and, as odd as it may get (and it gets very odd--check out the in-film sitcom starring nearly immobile actors in rabbit heads!), her reactions to it, at times brassy and headstrong, at times mewling and self-pitying, are enormously moving. ||
"Inland Empire" opens at the Oak Street Cinema on Fri., Feb. 16 and runs through Thu., Feb. 22 with nightly showings at 7:30 p.m. and matinees Sat. and Sun. at 4:15 p.m. $8 general / $6 seniors / $5 members and students. 309 Oak St. SE., Mpls. 612-331-3134 or mnfilmarts.org.
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