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or . . . It's three hours of fragmented, self-indulgent drivel. Few films are guaranteed to divide critics like a new Lynch work, and Inland Empire in particular seems to have left our arbiters of cinematic taste no breathing room. Just in case you hadn't already guessed what side I'm going to come down on, Inland Empire also demonstrates—more than any other film of recent memory—that our 21st century critics don't have the foggiest clue. I can remember a time when popular film critics wrote intelligently, before they existed only to outdo each other in hyperbole, all vying to see their names at the top of the stack of blurbs on the newspaper ads for the newest flicks. Nowadays film reviewing seems determined to keep up quality-wise with the mediocre releases (which, of course, somehow all manage to be "stunning", "dazzling" or "a new standard"). It's not hard to figure that a critic like the New York Post's Lou Lumenick, who gives high marks to King Kong and The Da Vinci Code, is going to do nothing but offer cheap puns ("He's Out to Lynch, Dern It!") in a review of Inland Empire. Perhaps what we need with Inland Empire, then, is something that's not precisely a movie review. Because Inland Empire isn't really a movie, at least not in the sense of what movies have come to mean in 21st century America. It doesn't just eschew explosions, macho posturing and illogical plotting; it also dispenses with linear narrative, clearly defined characters and morality. It is, in other words (gasp! shudder!) . . . ART. Trying to judge Inland Empire by the same rules used to judge a Mission Impossible 3 or a Happy Feet is like trying to talk about Van Gogh by comparing his work to Jack Kirby's. Kirby is a brilliant craftsman, but one who seemed to always intuitively grasp that he was working in a mass medium, one aimed most purely at entertainment; Van Gogh, of course, heard only his own voices, not those of the needy masses. Likewise, anyone who expects David Lynch—perhaps America's last true film artist—to create a simple entertainment is going to be disappointed when Lynch doesn't perform like an organ grinder's monkey dancing at the end of its chain. Of course Lynch has, on occasion, achieved tremendous popularity (ala Twin Peaks), but that was simply a case in which Lynch's own art happened to intersect with the zeitgeist. So, the question then becomes: Does Inland Empire succeed as art? Does it take us into the artist's world, reveal their vision, create something startling and unique? Oh yeah, baby. Inland Empire continues with several themes that seem to have pervaded Lynch's work since Lost Highway: Shifting identities, layers of reality, and class in our capitalist society are all explored here. As with both Highway and Mulholland Drive, Lynch starts with one character - in this case, a wealthy actress named Nikki—and shifts her through personas and class levels until she's literally reeling. After a brief prologue in which a distraught young Polish prostitute is distressed by a spectacularly inane sitcom (one involving giant rabbits), we meet Nikki as she's on the verge of reigniting her career by nabbing the lead in a film titled On High in Blue Tomorrows (that title, by the way, takes on a dreadful new meaning by the film's end). Nikki receives a visit from a creepy neighbor (wonderfully overplayed by Grace Zabriskie) who warns Nikki that the film will involved a "brutal fucking murder" (which, by the way, is my choice for Line of the Year). For perhaps the first quarter Inland Empire plays like one of those other movies, as Nikki makes the mistake of getting involved with her costar Devon (Justin Theroux, looking remarkably like Colin Farrell, but with a brain). Her possessive, Eastern European husband warns Devon that there will be "consequences" and "suffering" should he get involved with Nikki. The consequences spin us into the next reality, in which Nikki is now Sue, the character from On High in Blue Tomorrows, a middle-class woman who spends her days watching in perplexity as the other local housewives compare breast size and dance the Locomotion. Crosscut throughout are scenes in Poland, where a thug turns out to be a hypnotist named Krimp. And somehow Krimp—a hypnotist, remember—leads the way into the bottommost of Empire's worlds, and in this one Nikki is an abused and impoverished survivor (who delivers a one-take, half-hour monologue that will surely become a new standard in every acting workshop for the next twenty years). Finally this last, nameless woman will reach Hollywood Boulevard, where the former housewives are now prostitutes cruising for business to a percolating Beck tune, while Nameless/Sue/Nikki reaches her terrifying denouement. Inland Empire, like all of Lynch's work, is an emotional rollercoaster, by turns eerie, anxiety-inducing, utterly hilarious and weirdly joyous. In an image that blows all the year's so-called horror movies out of the water, Nikki shoots a man, only to have his face dissolve into a huge, terrifying bloody bubble. There's an honest-to-goodness gypsy curse, an invisible woman, a deeply unsettling soundtrack, and a mesmerized assassin (stunningly played by one-time prettyyoungthing Julia Ormond). There's also a scene in which a homeless woman and a sweet young Japanese girl argue over how to get from Hollywood to Pomona while someone dies between them. Black humor just doesn't get any better than that. Lynch's much-publicized decision to move into digital video may be both a blessing and a curse. Lynch apparently shot much of Empire on a consumer video camera, taping scenes he'd written just hours before, working in a technique not unlike that of Hong Kong's resident genius Wong Kar-wai; however, while Wong's films also tend to feature the gloriously saturated colors of Christopher Doyle's cinematography, Lynch's movie occasionally suffers from the grainy, high-contrast look of the relatively cheap video. Also, having the resources to shoot whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, seems to have given Lynch a lot to play with in editing, and truthfully Empire probably didn't need to be three hours long. Some of the Polish sequences, in particular, seem out of step with the rest of the film, neither twisting Nikki/Sue/Nameless more, nor exploring the very American class differences. Where Empire doesn't suffer, however, is in the performances. Laura Dern as Nikki/Sue/Nameless is a work of art unto herself, changing fluidly from one identity to the next, yet always somehow finding the same core in these characters. It's interesting that she hasn't worked with Lynch since 1990's Wild at Heart, and yet she seems so perfectly in sync with Lynch that it's almost as if she's become a personification of some feminine version of Lynch. And, as always with Lynch, the supporting cast—which includes Lynch alumni Diane Ladd, Harry Dean Stanton, and the afore-mentioned Justin Theroux and Grace Zabriskie—is worth the price of admission alone. My favorite cameo, however, goes to Mulholland Drive star Laura Elena Harring, who appears at the film's end blowing a kiss to Laura Dern, creating a witty and appropriate link between the last Lynch film and this one. The real key, I think, to viewing Inland Empire—like viewing any other work of art—is to simply experience it. Don't look for deeper meanings; don't try, like some film-school grad student, to pound Lynch's square peg into your theory's round hole. If you—unlike some of our paid critics - are willing to deal with the notion that films can (and should) occasionally be art, Inland Empire just may offer the richest three hours you'll get in a theater this year. But if you need a plot, set-in-stone characters and a triumph of good over bad . . . go see something like Night at the Museum instead. You deserve it.
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Lynch vivisects each and every aspect of the movie experience, smashing to bits all the little things that a century of narrative filmmaking have conditioned audiences to not see, sort in the way that Japanese audiences are supposed to politely "not see" Bunraku puppeteers as they stand onstage manipulating figures in plain view. What sort of things are audiences conditioned to not notice that Lynch hijacks? Lessee. Sound levels? Check! It's no coincidence that the guy who made Dune and gave the Atreides sound weapons uses sonic disruption to jelly the marrow of INLAND EMPIRE's audiences as the film's characters in one three-minute scene go through as many changes in reality as Henry Spencer did in Eraserhead. The shift that occurs when the projectionist changes reels? Check! Lynch even takes that barely perceptible jump and makes it a plot point involving the actual physical artifact of the movie that's unspooling in the projector behind your back in the theater. That said artifact is a window into the reality of the giant Bunnies and their sitcom is somehow even more bothersome than the thought of William Castle's Tingler being loose in the theater. Even contrast and editing aren't just used stylistically, but narratively. Lynch seems to go out of his way to make all these things obvious by destroying their invisibility, which doesn't just strip the movie naked, it strips the viewer of all his/her defenses that stand between him/her and the unreality of movies. The realities of INLAND EMPIRE intrude on each other, and the audience is stuck in the middle of these ebbs and flows. That bridge of light is a two-way street, kids . . . and if you're not careful, playing in that traffic can be dangerous. So, what are the shifting realities of INLAND EMPIRE? Well, let’s see. We start with fuzzy, goopy shots of a couple making love with their faces blurred out. Nothing makes soft-core porn even hotter than watching it through the fog of severe glaucoma. Then there’s a bunch of scenes featuring giant bunny rabbits in human clothes acting in a stiffly directed sitcom that moves a nameless young viewer to tears. Then the “plot” kind of unfolds as a beautiful Hollywood actress named Nikki (played by the incredibly brave Laura Dern) is told about "Brutal FUCKING murder!" from her neighbor, who also yaps about old gypsy folklore and a curse. Nikki is up for a big role in a major new Douglas Sirk wetdream of a movie: On High in Blue Tomorrows. Her neighbor warns Nikki against working on the movie, even though Nikki hasn't yet heard if she's gotten the part. The crazy old bag of a neighbor points to the spot across the living room where Nikki will be when she gets the news that she's gotten the role . . . and then we in the audience, along with Nikki and her neighbor, watch the moment in which Nikki gets the news that she's gotten the part unfold. The intrusion of the neighbor on Nikki's living space leads to an intrusion of our comfortable and convention notions of movie chronology. Now, folks . . . I’m writing this goddam thing, and I’ve lost count of all the realities we’ve covered so far. And guess what? Within INLAND EMPIRE’s three-hour running time, we’re only about ten minutes in. Lynch once again is riffing on film noir (as he did in Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive), using the tropes of film noir to achieve the kind of deconstruction of reality and society that the surrealists achieved in the early twentieth century. And just as a lot of great films noir (I’m thinking Double Indemnity, Chinatown, Sunset Boulevard, DOA and a few others) seem to state that LA is a place where morality and justice is impossible, Lynch seems to say that LA is a place where stable and tangible reality is impossible. It’s hugely telling that the single climax of many of INLAND EMPIRE’s plots takes place at the corner of Hollywood and Vine. But is INLAND EMPIRE any good? Lemme say upfront that INLAND EMPIRE is shot on a commercially available handheld digital camera . . . the kind of thing your drunk uncle insists on shoving in your face at the family Christmas party after bragging about how he talked down the price of the thing with the clerk at Best Buy. Projected on the screen, the individual pixels of the digital footage are the size of garbage can lids. The aforementioned sound mix will shatter bones. And, like I said, it’s three hours long. INLAND EMPIRE isn’t for everyone, in case you couldn’t figure that out. On the plus side, Laura Dern gives an incredibly heroic performance. The bits of plot that make sense are really interesting and deeply disturbing. It’s an incredibly demanding movie. Just as the movie's characters are shifting roles, so are the roles of the film watchers changing roles. There is no way to watch INLAND EMPIRE passively, and in a world of pre-chewed muliplex pap, it’s refreshing to see a movie that not only challenges you, but that’s actually out to kick your ass. I saw INLAND EMPIRE amid a flurry of press screenings; over the span of a few weeks, I screened and reviewed twenty-six movies. Of all these twenty-six movies, INLAND EMPIRE was the only one that gut-punched me so hard, I had to go home and take a nap afterward. It’s refreshing to have to respect a movie. If you’re up to the challenge, INLAND EMPIRE is well worth seeing all the way through for 15 rounds. Just get ready to face the most disturbing giant bunnies since Night of the Lepus.
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Click below to read Lisa's and Mike's (and before that Mike's and Gemma Files') other throw-downs:
