>>REVIEW
INLAND EMPIRE
STARRING Laura Dern, Justin Theroux and Jeremy Irons
DIRECTED BY David Lynch
Opens Friday, May 18
Uptown Screen
If you need a road into (or out of) the empire of David Lynch’s Inland Empire, try following the rabbits. These critters have long ears and brown fur like the kind you see in the woods. So what if they walk on two legs and speak without moving their mouths? They’re perfectly at home in Lynch’s universe and Inland Empire – a three-hour feature created on the fly over several years and shot by Lynch on a digital camera – sends audiences deeper into his Interzone than any film since Eraserhead.
The director’s devotees already regard Inland Empire as his Island of Misfit Toys, populated by images, themes and tropes first introduced in earlier or abandoned projects. The bunnies, for instance, are refugees from Rabbits, an online series on Lynch’s website. Here, the trio of person-sized hares – played by Lynch cast regulars like Naomi Watts and Justin Theroux, though it’s not like you can tell – appear in a shabby set that would serve Jackie Gleason and Samuel Beckett equally well. Judging by the laugh track, the rabbits are the stars of a family sitcom, a sort of Everybody Loves Raymond for human-animal hybrids. Yet the program’s only viewer, a desperate-looking woman in a hotel room, weeps as she watches.
This unnamed woman is our surrogate viewer, trapped much as we are by Inland Empire’s web of competing narratives and clashing imperatives. At the centre of these stories that unfold, intersect, stop dead and restart in disturbing new incarnations is an indisputably heroic performance by Laura Dern. When we first meet her, she is Nikki Grace, a Hollywood actress who’s excited to win an important role in a new film called On High in Blue Tomorrows. She loses some of her enthusiasm when she hears that there was an earlier attempt to make a movie based on the same story, except that production – mounted in Poland, where some of Inland Empire was filmed and seems to be set – was halted by the violent deaths of both lead actors. This does not bode well for Nikki or her ladies-man co-star Devon Berk (Theroux again).
Nor does it bode well for any viewer who believes that there are rules every film should follow, all of which Lynch is happy to break. (This includes the idea that digital video is only acceptable when it emulates film – Lynch prefers the pixelated murk he gets from his consumer-grade camera.) Both Nikki and the movie’s viewers struggle to contend with the resulting instability. The major setpieces – Nikki and Devon’s impassioned movie-within-movie scenes, Dern’s bracing monologue as a vengeful battered wife, a terrifying final breakdown at the corner of Hollywood and Vine – are interrupted by chase scenes, dance routines, Polish-language interludes and some scene about a guy with ketchup on his shirt.
Interpreted as a portrait of psychological disintegration (Nikki’s, to be specific, but maybe Lynch’s too), Inland Empire is even more harrowing than Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. Lynch’s plunge into the abyss is also confounding, thrilling, frustrating and occasionally awe-inspiring for what it suggests about the fluidity of identity and the possibilities of narrative. If you get lost, just trust in the rabbits. They seem to know what’s going on. |
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