Even today, Mulholland Drive [named for the man who brought water to LA, to CHINATOWN] is a rather lonely road, snaking along the crown of the Santa Monica Mountains above Los Angeles (and Hollywood). Originally prized as a Lovers Roost, on which the scintillating lights of the city below lit up passions, the road was famously risque in routines by Radio comedians of the 1940's. When Jack Benny mentioned Mulholland Drive or Pismo Beach, studio audiences blew audio tubes, sharing with glamorous guest stars the sexy in-jokes, rather mystifying to families in Geneva, Ohio -- or Missoula, Montana.

Writer/Director David Lynch hails from Missoula, and although he is young enough to remember onlly the tail-end of Radio's Golden Age, comedians re-cycled those radio jokes as they transitioned to TV, and Lynch, as if puzzled, has always been drawn to in-jokes and television -- which encompass the American sense of innocence and peril, sexual awakening and its disillusionment, family ties and the cutting of them, reality and illusion, adulthood and despair, talent and its destruction: Potential and How We Lose It. Mulholland Drive's shimmer of fame, erotic temptation and cheap sex, romance in the dark and a possible crime scene, must strike him as much a metaphor for America as small towns of his childhood did in his masterpiece: BLUE VELVET (1986).

At least, MULHOLLAND DRIVE, David Lynch's new film, which opened in mid-October 2001, gives such an impression of macabre humor and despairing sorrow. Like all his films, it is about surfaces, appearances, and the dreams or nightmares which lie beneath them.

Begun as a TV mini-series for ABC, the work proved even weirder than TWIN PEAKS, his popular sensation, which had made him a morning-after household word. The Network rejected MULHOLLAND DRIVE in 1999, and Lynch bitterly vowed never to work in TV again. That experience, too, may have worked its way into MULHOLLAND DRIVE, the Movie.

A French company, Canal, approached him about the footage, and he agreed to turn it into a feature film. With editing and extensive reshoots in the last hour, MULHOLLAND DRIVE emerges as a hypnotic, ghostly, creepy, nostalgic, funny, at times maddening -- incomprehensible -- psychodrama and dreamlike poem on the addiction of the Hollywood Experience. In other words, as we have all come to reside, whether we like it or not, in The Dream Factory, MULHOLLAND DRIVE likewise runs through both LA's la-la Land and Blue Velvet Country.

Lynch has gathered together a superb group of unknown or little known actors for his principle roles, and he has picked a casting directory of former movie or TV stars and performers for the bit parts and cameos. The unknowns give the film a dangerous freshness, as they did for BLUE VELVET [which David Thomson compared to CITIZEN KANE], while the veterans, in their familiarity, convey an eerie sense of both the passage of time and the arresting of cinematic history.

For all these reasons, people will either love MULHOLLAND DRIVE or claim it a hoax and a mess. And even those who love it will have to see it several times.

I've seen it once.

Cinematographer Peter Deming's opening shot is a disconcerting metaphor for the attraction, sustained over sixty years, of American Popular Entertainment. Crowds of youngsters, somehow stylized in sweaters and bobby-sox, jitter-bug in space. Then, the face of a wide-eyed, fresh-faced blonde girl looms up to obscure the dancers, and fill the screen, in a glare of klieg lights and flashbulbs.

Gidget-like Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) is GOING TO HOLLYWOOD!

Cut to a limousine making the difficult ascent of Mulholland Drive at night, the lights of the city like Christmas Tree bulbs stretching below and to the West. In the backseat is a ravishing, full figured brunette (Laura Harring), in a black silk evening dress. Her dark hair falls on bare shoulders, and in her eyes is a mixture of uncertainty and impatience. Intercut: two carloads of heedless, laughing teenagers in hotrods hairpinning toward the limo. Intercut: the car stops, and the brunette exclaims: "This is not it. We're not supposed to stop here." Intercut: the hotrods draw abreast. Intercut: the driver of the limo turns to the brunette, pistol equipt with silencer, and tells her to get out of the car. She hesitates.

Horrendous crash!

The brunette emerges unscathed save for a scalp wound and a concussion. From here on, it's all downhill to Hollywood. She stumbles in high heels over the embankment, toward new adventures, descending through several layers of Filmland history.

Meanwhile, back at the wreck, two detectives observe the ambulance people carting the bodies away. An earring has been found in the rear seat of the limousine. Detective Harry McKnight (Robert Forster) in hat and overcoat, looking very like Dana Andrews' Lieutenant Mark McPherson in LAURA (Preminger, 1944), observes, "Well, we may have a woman missing here."

The brunette continues her pilgrimage, first crossing Franklin, then Sunset Boulevard, having small encounters with the landscape, pausing to rest here, and further on. Eventually, she falls asleep in the foliage outside of Havenhurst Court.

An awed Betty Elms, from Deep River, Ontario, who on the strength of winning a dance contest has been promised a screen test, emerges in bright sunlight from an airliner in LA. Intercut: two men (Michael Fischer and Michael Cooke) sit in a famous diner, Winkie's. One of the two tells the other that he has always wanted to come to Winkies because of a dream -- a nightmare, really -- he keeps having. Intercut: a nice elderly couple, Betty's companions on the flight, smilingly wish her great success. "May you become a Big Star!" Intercut: the brunette wakes to see an elderly woman with luggage come out of the house in morning light and be driven away in a car. The brunette slips inside, and like a dark Goldielocks, falls asleep. Intercut: the man at Winkie's (which will figure frequently in the film) describes his dream. Intercut: Betty Elms has a cab driver take her to 1612 Havenhurst. Intercut: The other man at Winkie's tells his dreamer-friend he must confront his childish notion that some dreadful evil lurks behind the diner. Intercut: The nice elderly couple in a stretch limo follow Betty's cab. They are laughing and smiling vacantly, as if sharing a private joke. Intercut: Like a good psychiatrist, the man leads his friend quivering with fear outside . . . toward the back of Winkie's.

I hope that I have somewhat accurately conveyed the darkly magical first ten minutes of MULHOLLAND DRIVE. The film draws you in. For most of its 146 minutes, it only gets better.

The brunette is found taking a shower by Betty, who will house-sit while her Aunt, an established character actress, is away. Betty thinks the tall, dark young woman is her Aunt's friend. The brunette, suffering from amnesia, spies in the bathroom a poster for the movie GILDA (Vidor, 1946), and adopts the name of Rita. After she has to confess why she was in the house, and about her loss of memory, the young women are soon cooperating to discover who "Rita" really is.

Betty Elms in Hollywood is about to enter a terrible wonderland.

An entire other parallel plot strand involves a young director, Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), who appears to be casting the star of his first major film. The trouble is that, at a sit-down with mobsters (Dan Hadaya and Angelo Badalmenti), who are financing the movie, he is shown the picture of a pretty blonde, and told: "This is the girl." Everyone is answerable to a bloated Studio Head in a wheel chair (Michael J. Anderson, remembered as "the man from another place" in TWIN PEAKS). For him, too, without quite saying so, "This is the girl." He speaks to his hired help from a large glassed-in room.

It is indeed a case of not who you are, but who you know.

How will it work out?

The bridge between the two plots is Coco Lenoix, played by veteran star, Ann Miller. Coco is the den mother of Havenhurst Court, which is a kind of superannuated MELROSE PLACE or TALES OF THE CITY--South. She also turns up late in the movie for a pivotal scene, with a closer connection to the central story than we might have realized. Ann Miller may be one of the many keys to what Lynch is up to. At eighteen, one of the NEW FACES OF 1937, she has at least met all of Classic Hollywood's History, dancing her way from REVEILLE WITH BEVERLY (Barton, 1943) to KISS ME KATE (Sidney, 1953). At 82, hitting her marks, she has seen fresh young things, she has seen what happens to most of them, and she can express her tough compassion and distaste with a roll of her still expressive, limpid eyes.

Notice, in addition to Ann Miller and Robert Forster, the old leading players who pop up in small parts. Chad Everett is reduced to a lecherous leading man at Betty's "screen test." Diane Baker and Lee Grant are in the film, but hard to recognize. And beefy Billy Rae Cyrus is revealed a handyman home-breaker at Director Kesher's modest estate.

MULHOLLAND DRIVE touches on many film genres, but especially noirs, like LAURA (Preminger, 1944), THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (Welles, 1948), VERTIGO (Hitchcock, 1958), CHINATOWN (Polanski, 1974), 2 DAYS IN THE VALLEY (Herzfeld, 1996), and LA CONFIDENTIAL (Hanson, 1997). They (and others) reverberate as sub-texts throughout the film.

Perhaps because of its original conception as a TV series, Deming's breathtaking color-saturated photography emphasizes medium and close-up shots but because of Lynch's inventive camera placement, these devices are never tiring, as in so many "big" pictures recently. The opening of the film, with its brilliantly edited action is very Wellsian, which gives way to something more like what Hitchcock or Claude Chabrol might do. (For much of its length, it certainly has a French quality to it.)

The music by long time collaborator Angelo Badalamente (who also plays one of the Mafia financeman, an espresso connoisseur) and Lynch himself reinforce the rueful reflection on Hollywood, utilizing everything from a recreation of Connie Stevens-style Doo-Wop singers, in various shades of hair and skin, to a magnificent growling under-theme that might have been additional music Bernard Herrmann had left over from CITIZEN KANE. An expressionistic sound track enhances the viewing experience of MULHOLLAND DRIVE, certainly in a major theater.

What are some of the other keys?

Too many to relate here.

Perhaps, just a few: There is that Blue Box -- it would have to be blue, would it not? It is a box in every sense of the word, clenched between Betty's quaking thighs, containing dope, memory, desire, loss, release, murder, and pure hell. There are the blue keys which appear throughout MULHOLLAND DRIVE, one of which opens the universal Blue Box.

A character known as "The Cowboy" appears three times in the MULHOLLAND DRIVE. He embodies all the Western Stars from Broncho Billy Anderson, William S. Hart, and Tim McCoy, with a seasoning of Howard Hughes, to Gene Autry, all of whom bought property and attained power in the first fifty years of American movies. The Cowboy is Hollywood's God (as the figure behind Winkies is the Devil). He also -- politely but full of certainty -- tells Director Kesher: "This is the girl."

"The girl" in various reincarnations is Naomi Watts or her surrogates. English-born, educated in Australia, a bit like Madeline Carroll, she is extraordinary here, ranging from Nancy Drew to something much more depraved. Although not well known, she has made more than half a dozen films and done lots of TV. When she was introduced to a preview audience before the film's release, obviously excited to be the star of what she rightly imagines an important film, she was as frisky and virginal as Betty Elms, when we first meet her in MULHOLLAND DRIVE. She told us of the kindnesses of David Lynch, his dedication to his craft, his painting, his interest in music, his furniture-making; and how he cheerily directed her through multiple 15-minute takes of a masturbation scene in extreme close-up.

Finally, despite the fact that I can't spoil or solve for you a film as rich as MULHOLLAND DRIVE, notice this is a picture full of women, most of them blonde. The males, including an inefficient hitman, have all the power, but this is a very dark story about women, what they love, who they love, how they love, and why they lose it.

Doppelgangers abound.

Even Laura Harring, sultry, dark and striking, fits the theme. It is not by accident that she takes Rita Hayworth's name in MULHOLLAND DRIVE. Austrian, German, and Mexican, born in Los Mochis, Harring is a former Miss USA, and was once married to Count Carl Edward von Bismarck. (Shades of GILDA!) She looks rather like the young Rita Hayworth, before Harry Cohn had her hair dyed red and shaved back from her forehead. But it is when Betty Elms fits her with a blonde wig that she becomes an uncanny likeness of Hayworth, as she looked when Welles cut and bleached her hair for THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI.

MULHOLLAND DRIVE has a very difficult last half hour. You may want to conclude Lynch is pulling our leg, or even be tempted to laugh, but stay with it, and plan to see it again, as I do. MULHOLLAND DRIVE is a tragic homage, an ode, a requiem if you will, for all the aspiring talent who ever left West Bromich, Brooklyn, Cincinnati, Kenosha, Missoula, Wallace, or Los Angeles to go to Hollywood.

MULHOLLAND DRIVE may be David Lynch's best film since BLUE VELVET.

Released October 12, 2001.

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March 13, 2002: I have now seen MULHOLLAND DRIVE three times, and each time, it seems to me the movie had been changed. Things have fallen into place in ways I had not seen before. If you have not seen it yet, let me urge you to do so.

What I can add to this review, after my additional viewings, is that the film is indeed a mixture of dream and nightmare, stirred from ambition, desire, regret, guilt, drugs and despair in the first moments of the film. Pay attention to the figure breathing beneath the covering in the opening sequence. All the events of the film may be said to have taken place in that instant. Such a foreshadowing is one of a score that I missed the first time through.

Universal Pictures handled MULHOLLAND DRIVE miserably. When it received its first nominations as Best Picture from the New York, National and LA Critics, the Studio should have been ready to open it wide, the way a Hitchcock would have been treated. In fact, MULHOLLAND DRIVE played in few theaters, even in major cities.

Nevertheless, I believe MULHOLLAND DRIVE, virtually ignored by the Oscars, is the Best Film of 2001. It will be discussed and admired for many years.

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June 18, 2002: MULHOLLAND DRIVE is now on its way to being a classic, as I foretold. It has been released on DVD, but in typical Lynch fashion, there are no extras to speak of. You have to just experience the movie or rely on reviews like this one.

BTW, this essay has now been read by over 4000 people, and soon may be one to the ten most read movie reviews ever at Epinions.

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July 29, 2002: Friday Night (the 26th), I had the honor of meeting Ann Miller in person, at a splendid charity benefit in San Francisco's Castro Theater. She was gracious and spoke with a couple of hundred people in the hour and a half before a showing of KISS ME KATE. I conveyed a copy of this review to her, and later, in an interview with Jan Wahl from the stage of the Castro Theater, she confirmed essentially the interpretation of MULHOLLAND DRIVE you have just read.

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April 20, 2004: While here, I might note that Ann Miller passed away on January 22, 2004. She was suffering from cancer when I met her at the Castro Theater. A year later, she told a friend that it had reached her lungs. "They got me at last," she is quoted as saying.

Always the trooper.

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Over 10,000 people have now read this review. My humble thanks to all of you. I hope you have become as fascinated with the film as I am.
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If you wish to explore all of Macresarf1's reviews, indexed by title and category, many with URL's, paste to your browser and go to the following --

http://www.epinions.com/content_2514526340


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*I should note that the AGTTM Write-off was sponsored by Curtis Edmonds, and concerned the many theaters which donated ticket sales and concession profits on Tuesday, September 25, 2001, to Relief for the families of those who died so terribly on September 11th. I must add further that, though this was an advance screening of MULHOLLAND DRIVE at the Landmark Embarcadero in San Francisco, my Lady Mary Ann's healthy appetite and my own, plus a financial contribution equal to the ticket sale, stand in lieu of original plan.

The AGTTM Write-off officially kicked off Monday, October 1, 2001, and I notice other participants in the field already. Please find them at the Write-off URL:

http://www.txreviews.com/AGTTM/index.html

Below is a list of those who had participated, as of 9/29/01. (Convenient links may be found at the URL above.) Please read and rate these Epinionators supportive of those in such sudden and terrible need:

"2001: A Space Odyssey: Kubrick's Fantasia (Disney on drugs?)", by artbyjude

"Rock Star: There Has To Be Something More", by curtisedmonds

"An Affair To Remember: Grandeur of the Empire State", by deaser26

"The Anniversary Party: In Ecstasis Veritas", by davidk93

"The Musketeer: Hell Hath No Torture To Match It", by elerad

"The Others: You See Dead People", by green1

"The Americanization of Emily: 'I think I'd call it piquant!'", by gungian

"The Glass House: Frankenstein Meets The Parent Trap And All Goes To Hell", by jankp

"Kagemusha: Some have greatness thrust upon them", by jiahong

"Moulin Rouge: Silly Love Songs, A Lot Of Silly Love Songs," by kuuleimomi

"Moulin Rouge: A musical fairy tale that will rewrite history", by lorensilver

"Mulholland Drive: David Lynch's Best Film In Years," by macresarf1

"Michael Douglas & Brittany Murphy in Don't Say a Word", by mangiotto

"My Cousin Vinny: Two 'Yewts', a green Buick... and murder", by mkp51

"Islands in the Stream: George C. Scott plays Hemingway", by stephen_murray

"China: The Panda Adventure: Panda-Mania", by susangranger

"New York: A Documentary Film: New York, New York", by telynor

"Rush Hour 2: Leg Shots, Martial Arts, Michael Jackson Imitations and a movie on the side...", by tibullus

"The Generosity of Isaac Stern: Sharing His Musical Wisdom, Passion with the Chinese", by tlimjoco

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UPDATE: June 12, 2005 -- I invite you to visit the "BLOG" which I now maintain on my Epinions Profile Page, where I occasionally discuss matters of the day:

http://www.epinions.com/user-macresarf1/show_~View_Profile#long_bio











Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age