Review of the David Lynch film Inland Empire, originally published (under the name R.G. Strait) in OC Metro, 2006.
Over the last few decades, David Lynch has consistently confounded his audiences; he’s mixed crowd-pleasing oddities like “The Elephant Man”, “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive” with less popular, aggressively baffling fare like “Lost Highway”. But nothing he’s brought us in all these years – not even those last few episodes of “Twin Peaks”, when it sometimes seemed like Lynch was determined to drive away what was left of the show’s fans – has been as weird as “Eraserhead”, the 1977 cult classic that made his name. “Eraserhead” was like Lynch had put a tap to his head and let all the nightmares come gushing out at once. Compared to it, a picture like “Wild at Heart”, for all its ostentatious oddness, seems as tame as “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm”.
Lynch’s latest film, “Inland Empire”, could almost be considered “Eraserhead II”. The two films share a bracing disregard for standard narrative logic, and both were shot sporadically, over the course of several years, as Lynch cooked up new ideas and his actors drifted in and out of his life.
“Inland Empire”’s title doesn’t refer to the place so much as the internal reality of the human mind; Laura Dern, returning from whatever black hole she apparently fell into sometime around 1999, is great as Nikki, a fading actress who signs on for a role in a film directed by a world-weary, pretentious Englishman (Jeremy Irons, but of course). Unfortunately it turns out the film has been cursed by gypsies, and as we follow its production Nikki’s reality begins to break down around her and she finds herself turning into her luckless character from Irons’ film. That’s about as coherent as the plot ever gets. There are musical numbers - including some Hollywood Blvd. hookers doing the Locomotion - and Lynch’s “Mulholland” star, Naomi Watts, has a small role here as one of a troupe of talking rabbits… the film just keeps throwing wacky stuff at us, on and on, for three hours, and while it’s exhausting and difficult to love, it is also mesmerizing.
Go in expecting an actual plot, and you’ll leave bitterly disappointed. (Actually, it’s your own fault; who the heck goes to a David Lynch movie for the plot, anyhow?) But Lynch takes us on an unforgettable trip here, from Hollywood to Poland to an Inland Empire all his own.
