Review: Mulholland Dr.

       David Lynch is known as kind of a weirdo. His films like Eraserhead, Dune, and Inland Empire are surreal, confusing, mind-benders. Mulholland Dr. is arguably his most successful experiment in filmmaking. It's a bizarre tale about Hollywood and the way it can chew people up and spit them out. Originally, Mulholland Dr. was meant to be a TV show, and much of the footage of the film was meant to be for the pilot. Of course no network would buy a show with such a bizarre concept, so Lynch wrote an ending to the open-ended story started in the pilot, and mishmashed the two halves into one of the most brilliant, yet confusing movies of the last decade.

       Usually, this is the part of the review where I give a brief synopsis of the plot of the film. However, there is a moment in the movie which draws into question whether anything we saw happened at all, and what order it happened in. There are other scenes which are only tangentially related to the main story and we are forced to figure out for ourselves how everything fits together, if at all. The main story line involves a dark-haired woman who escapes her murder when the car she is riding in gets hit by a drunk driver. She then stumbles back towards Los Angeles and sneaks into a house belonging to an elderly woman. The old woman is leaving to go on a trip to Canada, and her young niece Betty (Naomi Watts) is moving in while she is away to pursue an acting career in the movies. Betty finds the dark-haired woman and we soon learn that she is suffering from amnesia from the accident. The two of them then try to piece together who she is using what few clues they have. There's also a plot involving a director being pressured by the mob to cast a specific girl for his next film, and other barely related scenes involving a bumbling hitman and another with a man suffering from terrible nightmares. While this film sounds like a terrible mess, the pure emotions of the characters in each scene carry the movie, and we keep watching because we think we will eventually be able to piece it all together.

       At first I thought the acting wasn't all that special, but the bad acting actually serves a purpose to differentiate the two parts of the film. It's an interesting storytelling technique that makes sense in the context of the film if you subscribe to the prevailing theory about the story of the film. This is the film that launched the career of Naomi Watts, and she is spectacular in the leading role. The script is truly confusing. The entire second half of the film I just kept asking what was going on. I wasn't even sure who was who as each actor began to portray different characters. If you're looking for a straightforward, easy to follow story, this is not for you. However, If you want to see a movie that will make you think for yourself, one that forces you to draw your own conclusions, Mulholland Dr. is a wild ride.

For those of you who have seen the movie, this explanation is the best, most carefully thought out theory about the plot of this movie I could find. If you haven't seen this movie, don't read this as it contains numerous spoilers.