I emerged last night from David Lynch's sorry excuse of a movie, Inland Empire. No doubt, critics will be raving over this latest surrealistic exploration into filmmaking and nightmare worlds, contending how it challenges meaning in moving pictures and our understanding of transcendence and meaning and purpose.
Bullshit.
First, a caveat: I do not have an instinctive distaste for Lynch's work (actually, it is pathetic that I need to include a caveat to prevent my review from being dismissed outright; but such is the cult of David Lynch that even with one, your credibility is challenged if you do not pay some homage to his other films). Mulholland Drive, as opaque as it was, was able to draw me in, and provoke a reaction to its sweeping ideas and characters. Inland Empire did none of these. It was a nonlinear patchwork of vignettes, carelessly stitched together for the sake of discontinuity (or worse, for the sake of style), rather than designing and using the melange as a plot device.
The few threads of linkages between the otherwise incoherent scenes were, at best, poorly contrived. Instead of thoughtfully introducing subtle metaphor or allusion to the disparate scenes, Lynch resorted to cheap tie-ins: A common prop, a phrase or two used repeatedly in dialogue. There was little imagination, little that was original, and that which was was uninspiring.
The scenes, themselves, were pieces of sophomoric filmmaking: Weakly directed, unimaginative takes. The scene where a girl flashes her breasts to her friends was reminiscent of opening scenes in Girls Gone Wild. The kissing scene between Laura Dern and Karolina Gruszka seemed recycled, and unnecessary. The filmmaking scenes between Dern and Justin Theroux were pedestrian. The dance sequences seemed like they could have been the product of a high school film project.
How can I fail to mention the Dern-Look-of-Terror? Every 10 minutes in the final hour or so, we were treated to the spectacle of her explorations in what must have appeared in the script as
Inland Empire does have its moments. The conversation between a man and woman on a snowy Polish street had depth and underlying tension, despite seemingly innocuous dialogue. The scene where Laura Dern lies bleeding to death while others discuss the best route to Pomona has flashes of brilliance and deeper meaning. But overall, these are few and far between, and the hodgepodge is a mindfuck for the sake of being a mindfuck.
If Inland Empire was Lynch's first piece for the large schreen, I think he would simply have faded from the public consciousness as a controversial director. Thankfully, it wasn't, but this does not exonerate the traversity of a movie that is Inland Empire.