Inland Empire

For those who felt Lynch's last film, Mulholland Dr., was too easy, I present to you Inland Empire. The director takes the whole dream (or nightmare) narrative a step further and makes the narrative even more fragmented and impossible to follow. There might not really be much of a narrative at all. The recognizable plot begins with Laura Dern as an aging actress, having spent a while as a housewife, trying to re-enter the movie industry. She wins a role and, during filming, she starts to fall for her co-lead (Justin Theroux). Which is strange, given that the film is about a straying housewife. Soon, real life and screen life become completely blurred, until the actress only exists in her fictional life. Maybe. God knows at this point. The film becomes completely incomprehensible by any conventional standards. Which doesn't in any way mean that it's worthless. Like all Lynch films, Inland Empire is deeply hypnotic, often haunting and occasionally downright scary. I wish there were a little more sense to it so I could connect a bit more. And the fact that the film runs for nearly three hours; it's easy to get restless. I think a good number of people are going to find this to be Lynch's folly. It is disappointing, especially as we've waited five years since Mulholland Dr., probably his best film, but there are a few of Lynch's movies that I like less than this.

No seriously. WTF. Ignore my rating because a movie like this defies any kind of a linear rating scale. My real rating is: WTF stars. Everyone else can write their absurd words about the film but the only thing a normal honest person can say after watching this is... what the actual f**k did I just watch?

Seriously, watch the film then come back to this review and tell me it isn't the most accurate summation of the film on here.

Side note: Laura Dern seriously does give an incredible performance. No one quite captures the true essence of WTF like Laura. She really does elevate the film to higher levels of "WTF-ness" than it ever would achieve on it's own.

For real though. What the actual f**k?

I saw INLAND EMPIRE at the Venice Film Festival world premiere last month. I want to keep this review short due to the fact that writing in great detail about this film is useless. INLAND EMPIRE is an experience. An experience not to be written about but to be FELT. It is David Lynch's definitive work. It's everything he has ever wanted to put into a film and it's completely free from anyone else's taming influence. The film is suffocating, dark and endless yet paradoxically contains some of the director's funniest and lightest scenes. I was frightened, uneasy, overwhelmed and moved. My emotions were thrown into disarray several times during which I lost all sense of appropriate reaction. Do not expect the mystery of this film to be solved, but expect it to be finished. Do not expect your head to understand the resolution but expect that your heart and intuition will.

If you cannot decide whether to see this film or not, I implore you to get up and go. Whether or not you enjoy it, you will never see a film like this again. I also implore you to see it IN THE CINEMA. Do not wait to see it on DVD because the experience won't be half as extraordinary.

I saw this during a period of extreme emotional stress, probably the best possible mode. It was also surrounded by my listening to "Big Fish," Lynch's book, read by himself. The contrast is astonishing: Lynch's banal aphorisms in the book with rich, multilayered cinematic literacy in the film. Yet another lesson in relative articulation and the notion that an artist often is the worst authority on himself.

Let's have no mistake: this film is important. I place it on my list as one of the two films of 2006 that you must see.

There's a lot to say about this. I think I'll let others comment on Dern's attunements, and the general notion of the story having to do with guilt and sexual desire.

I'll comment only on two aspects which struck me. The first was how Polish this movie is. Its Polish within the story of course: a good half of the action involves Poles. The plot device is a Polish curse that somehow bends time and causality. And there are some Polish locations as well.

But the thing is shot using Kieslowski's mannerisms. Its a peculiar style that to my knowledge no one else has used. It focuses on two motions: that of the environment as space which governs and changes. And that of the characters in motion, but situated in the spaces. With Kieslowski, he literally splits these in the writer's mind by having his writing partner handle the noir bits, the controlling fate, and he handling the independently sprouting human seeds within. Lynch handles both sides by imposing schizophrenia.

But its Polish in other ways too. The actor as Golem. The environment as interleaved worlds, each creating the others by being. Its a Kabbalistic concept. Both are characteristically Polish, usually associated with Polish Jews, but more deeply Polish. You can see how Lynch understands this because he quotes "The Saragossa Manuscript," a Polish film about interweaving of kabbalistic worlds and the causal confusion that it brings.

The second thing is how he exploits this merger of folded narrative -- where actors write new worlds; layered emanations where worlds spawn others -- not parallel but linked in generative fate; geometric cosmology in which each act creates symmetries we encounter elsewhere.

He does all this by elaborating on the symmetries of cause. Ordinarily something causes something else, never backwards. Here it IS backwards, forwards, sideways -- all the eight dimensions that an advanced student of the Maharishi knows... causal symmetries that have a geometry that doesn't quite merge with the geometry of causality. Oddly, the story does make sense if you simply relax the causality a bit -- its much more accessible than the "Twin Peaks" meander.

I guess I should say that this is after the manner of the structure of "Finnegans Wake." Its not as elaborate of course. It didn't take 17 years and the deliberate intent of conflating all metaphors. But it is placed in a dream logic, a softening of the walls and hinges of what we make up as the logic of real life. Its Joycean through and through and not -- as some would say -- "surreal" as if anything not real is bent reality.

I know of a few filmmakers who can work with these notions: Medem, Greenaway, Madden, Ruiz. This is the most delicate and focused I've seen in a long, long while. You really must spend time with it. You must.

Here's a serious piece of advice though. See Lynch's "Rabbits" episodes first, separately, ideally a week or so ahead. Take them in as a standalone piece, a remarkable piece of film. Some of it is in this film, excerpted, extended, reshot and literally entered by all the Dern characters. But you'd be better having that anchor before starting this tempestvoyage.

Ted's Evaluation -- 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.

I first saw "Inland Empire" in early 2007 and opted not to write about it mainly because I really didn't know how I felt about the film (or video, if you're into semantics) after I saw it. I went to the late night show, was almost certainly inebriated, went with a group of friends (at this point I still had a social life), and remember little about the screening except that I enjoyed the film and appreciated it on some level or the other. Well, I'm glad I didn't attempt to write about "Inland Empire" based on that viewing because my feelings are drastically different this time around. What I found to be a fascinatingly incomprehensible nightmare-on-video the first time I saw it, what I found to be an extremely nonsensical film overall, I now feel is one of the most important and greatest artistic works of the decade, and nowhere near as flawed and incomprehensible as I initially thought. I'm not going to attempt an analysis of the film, greater minds have done that already, so I'll stick to a simple review of it.

Perhaps "Inland Empire" does recycle elements of Lynch's previous work. I find it a less powerful experience than his 2001 masterpiece "Mulholland Dr." which with every viewing comes closer to toppling "Vertigo", my favorite film since I first saw it at age 12 or 13. I do think the video is used badly at some points in the film. It's a testament to Lynch's skill as director and cinematographer (and camera operator) that he was able to achieve this sort of thing with a dated, mediocre digital camera, but on rare occasions in the film, particularly during outdoor daytime shots, the poor quality of the camera itself isn't conquered by Lynch's creativity and skill in using it as well as it can possibly be used. However, other than that very small problem I really struggle to find anything I would cut out of the film. Considering its length, that's really something. In fact, I'm dying to see "More Things that Happened", one of the DVD extras which features over seventy minutes of footage shot for the project and not included in the final cut of the film. The film is, surprisingly for something shot with such primitive digital technology, formally elegant and consistently well-shot. What would Van Gogh have done with a set of cheap crayons and color pencils? The film makes fascinating use of color and light, and boasts possibly the best use of close-ups since Leone. These are even uglier, in a good way.

The most common criticism of "Inland Empire" seems to be that it's a total mess, a bunch of nonsensical weird goings-on strung together and put out for pseudo-intellectuals to dissect in their setting of choice (the average pseudo-intellectual favors either the internet or the great coffee shop which isn't a chain... yet, the cool pseudo-intellectuals enjoy the sort of bar which frequently doubles as an art gallery, but that's besides the point). This is both true and untrue, and I suspect the more times I see the film the more I'll see it as untrue. Where the truth of these claims lies, mostly, is in the fact that, as a fellow IMDb user notes, the film doesn't just shun narrative tradition but acts as if such a thing never existed. However, to say there are no themes or emotions being expressed, to say there are no stories being told in the film, seems to me not a matter of opinion but simply incorrect, and indicates an extraordinarily narrow-minded and simplistic view of cinema as a form of linear storytelling and nothing else.

While it does not have a 'plot', "Inland Empire" has a story. In fact it has several stories to tell, including that of actress Nikki Grace (Laura Dern), that of a battered housewife (Laura Dern), and that of a hooker working Hollywood boulevard (Laura Dern). There's also a giant rabbit sitcom and a Polish prostitute. Most of these strands start out relatively linearly and the film is mostly overall quite easy to follow for more than an hour of its running time, standard Lynch surrealism excepted. The film grows gradually more bizarre as the stories interact and occasionally merge with each other, the themes they have in common becoming clearer in some instances and less clear in others. The narratives all have great payoff as the film draws to a close. I didn't understand everything in "Inland Empire" and I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to, but it's really not even close to being the sort of deliberately distancing, deliberately obscure sort of thing Godard sometimes does. It doesn't mistake obfuscation for art.

I can safely say I can't recall one dream I've had which didn't do exactly what "Inland Empire" did: start out as a linear narrative and then spiral out of control (my dream last night about Kirk and Spock's love lives in Starfleet turning into a spectacular time travel government conspiracy Tribble-centric crossover with "Star Wars" and "Lost" being just one example). The brilliance of Lynch's work here is that he was able to capture that and to control it, to explore themes with it, to express emotions with it. That's rare talent, that's rare skill at work. It doesn't hurt that his is a more interesting and freakish mind than most of ours. "Inland Empire" doesn't seek to tell a simple, straightforward story. Criticizing it for not doing so indicates either misunderstanding or a narrow-minded view of cinema. As a formal experiment and as an overall achievement "Inland Empire" is up there with Lynch's very best and as a result with the very best of cinema in general.