Inland Empire
Many thought “Mulholland Dr.,” David Lynch’s haunting tale of unrequited love in Hollywood, was difficult to understand. Sure, it had plenty of weird, unexplained elements, but Lynch’s follow-up, “Inland Empire,” makes “Mulholland Dr.” seem like an episode of “Sesame Street.”
“Inland Empire” never lets your find your footing. You think you’ve settled into a groove, and then it pulls the rug out. It’s difficult to describe how exactly this happens, because the movie demands so much of you that I can’t recall the precise moments when I said, “OK, now we’ve slipped into another plane of unreality.” But, looking back, you’re never really grounded. Yes, for a half-hour, maybe 45 minutes, Lynch pursues a vaguely linear narrative, about an actress (Laura Dern) with a wealthy, domineering husband who gets a part in a romantic melodrama, with Justin Theroux as her co-star and Jeremy Irons as her director. She finds out that the movie they’re shooting is actually a remake of a picture that was never finished because the two leads were murdered, and she starts to see parallels between her own situation and the turmoil that led to the slayings. But … there’s a lot of crazy stuff before we get to Dern, and we’re introduced to her by a bug-eyed, creepy elderly woman with a hard-to-place Eastern European accent. She says something about having trouble distinguishing between today, two days from now and yesterday, and then she tells Dern that this time tomorrow, she’ll be sitting on the sofa across the room from where they’re sitting, and then, after a single bravura edit, Dern is in fact sitting on that sofa, chatting with her friends. The old woman is gone, never to return. Is it the next day? It seems to be. She gets a call telling her she’s got the part, and off we go. It’s impossible, then, to trust anything you’re seeing, even in the movie’s most seemingly straightforward scenes.
And that’s when you set aside the shadowy, suggestive chronicles of prostitutes in Poland, or the young woman who weeps as she watches, on television, a surveillance-style camera observing three people in rabbit suits — one a harried husband in a suit, one a housewife with an iron, and a third of indeterminate gender — as they exchange seemingly banal but subtly barbed dialogue. Occasionally, at an uncomfortable moment between the bunnies, a sitcom-style laugh track will chime in. I don’t know what the rabbits are for, but I can’t say they’re not fun to watch. The same goes for the harem of women who may or may not be Theroux’s ex-girlfriends, who break into a precise, enthusiastic dance to “The Loco-Motion.”
Lynch incorporates pop music from different eras with stunning fluidity. He’s also brilliant at locating a panoply of moods within the same physical space, be it spartan or opulent. He’s a breathtakingly talented filmmaker.
The movie, while occasionally mind-numbing as it progresses from one grubby, amorphous image to another (Lynch shot on low-grade digital video), really is enjoyable, on the whole. It has moments of utter hilarity, moments of bone-chilling tension, moments of searing emotional truth. It’s just that none of it has the connective tissue that moviegoers expect. Broadly, I think Lynch is exploring themes of female victimization. The tagline for “Inland Empire,” presumably concocted by Lynch himself because he’s distributing the movie himself, is “A Woman In Trouble.” And Dern plays several variations of that archetype. She’s an object of desire and an object of revulsion; she’s subjected to overt violence and hovering menace, much of it sexual, all of it the fault of men. The movie is essentially feminist: Lynch appears to be responding to the way women are conventionally treated in movies, the way their experiences are filtered through a male point of view, and trying to liberate them. (Note the qualifiers in these claims — I’m not sure about any of this, and I don’t think anyone could be after just one viewing of “Inland Empire.”) Dern is extraordinary. It’s not a “performance” in any conventional sense of the term, because she’s not building a character across the span of a narrative with any temporal or spatial consistency. She’s playing several different women, or the same woman with several different personae. Either way, she pours herself into every scene and shows heart, grace and emotional nakedness.
“Inland Empire” is a brave, uncompromising, incomprehensible movie that springs from the mind of a genuine artist, unconcerned with anything beyond his own obsessions. (The title suits the film, in that I have no idea what it means, but it sounds really cool.) If you like this sort of thing, I can’t recommend it more highly. For my part, it makes me want to see everything Lynch ever made, then go back and find out what a second viewing would reveal.