Directed by David Lynch
Running time 135 mins
Certificate 18
So what's this doing here? I mean, we all know that the 'Mudge has an, ahem, sporadic publication schedule and that we sometimes review films that are a bit well established in the smaller screens of your multigigaplex, but this takes the biscuit. After all, this has been out for ages and has been reviewed by absolutely everybody. Well, in my defense I have to say it's not my fault. Blame the distribution company, because if the damn thing was showing on more than three screens across the entire North of England, I would have been, written and gone by now. Three screens, I ask you. I mean, how many miles of white canvas is that dogturd Spawn being projected on, huh? Huh? Couldn't you spare one screen with Dolby, somewhere, rather than making me cram my (pert but not chiseled) arse into a circa-1922 design arthouse (for arthouse read unreformed fleapit) combined seat and G-clamp, all the while attempting to lip-read the dialogue.
As for the "everyone else has reviewed it" nonsense, let's get something straight. I've explained this before, I'll explain it again: they are wrong, I am right. If they agree with me on anything, it's just a statistically improbable but not impossible coincidence, like a rock rolling down hill matching the speed of a downhill skier. It's not to be viewed as an indicator of sentience.
This is particularly true when applied to the consensus reviews of Lost Highway. You know, you've read them all. Bill Pullman plays a jazz saxophonist who gets videos of him and his wife at home, shot without their knowledge. He then may (or may not) have killed his wife, then becomes someone else. It's two unconnected halves of the film, which falls apart and becomes two separate movies: it's uncomfortable and disjointed, the second half is not as good as the first, but it's visually stunning and a surrealist masterpiece.
'Scuse me? Did we watch the same film, because we seem to be on different pages of the script here. This isn't a surrealist masterpiece, because it's not a surrealist film. It is a masterpiece, but it's a masterpiece of film noire: because surrealism throws the unexpected, the perverse into the face of the viewer, yet all the while those within the image are at ease with what they are confronted with or surrounded by. Noire takes a seemingly innocent figure and throws them into hell. They are confronted with forces and environments totally out of their control and experience and forced to deal with what happens to them. Surrealism affects the viewer, noire the character.
Bill Pullman is dragged into a world that makes no sense: no-one is who they seem, not even him. Actions are changed in memory, memories changed by action and nothing is constant. What happens, all happens to him, no matter what he looks or acts like. Just because he may have a different face, doesn't mean it's not the same man, or the same script. It may jar, but hang tight, because there is a much bigger story here than you will realize initially. It's impossible and almost treacherous to you as viewer and Lynch as director for me to start giving you details about what goes on here, but when this movie is over, you'll know that a work of raw genius has been enacted here.
It really does seem that a five-year respite has done David Lynch the power of good. Indeed, we seem to be confronted by a new director: calmer, darker, more measured and bolder, with some of his old fixations stripped away. His earlier work, apart from the hideously mutilated final cut of Dune, was about the dirt that middle America is built upon, the perversion and violence that intrudes upon, but can never really defeat, the honest. For all that people rail on about the horror in Lynch movies, films like Blue Velvet talk about the possibilities of hope. Wild At Heart even gained a happy ending absent from the book, where the love of boy and girl is enough to kill the wicked witch (it's a long story). His unfairly curtailed masterpiece, Twin Peaks, dwelt in this same wooded suburbia, hoping against hope that the world will finally come good.
Lost Highway finds Lynch's attentions shifted to an arid California, where artists and crooks are more common than fishing tackle shops. It's as if his traditional muse has been replaced by something more sinister, a direct reaction to his Hollywood experiences. The cloud of evil that has always been present is now more likely to reign forever than be blown away. The traditional Lynch female, the Tess Trueheart type, has been replaced by a pathological femme fatale, the innocent young hero replaced by a jaundiced and confused adult.
There's been a major house-clearing here. The old Lynch themes are gone, but so is are many of his trade-marks, such as his company of actors. Yup, weird as it seems, no Kyle Maclachlan. Not to say that it's all new: the mighty and sorely missed Jack Nance crops up, and long-time Lynch composer Angelo Badalamenti has obviously realized that hanging out with that fey loser Tim Booth is a hiding to nothing, so he's back on board. Best of all, Lynch has brought his old, trademark genius and his total mastery of the unanticipatable with him. There's also his brilliance in casting: after all, who would dare take light comedy/action hero Bill Pullman, previously most famous for playing a fighter-pilot President, and cast him as a man being pursued by forces beyond imagination, rather than just from beyond Ursa Minor. He is as perfect and unexpected as Nick Cage was in Wild At Heart, or Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet. Even when seemingly absent, he dominates the movie, with his brief words about the nature of memory becoming a mantra for the audience as they try to separate illusion from deception. As for reality, that's too elusive a concept to be ever be found.
At the center of this intangible continuity is another masterful piece of casting. Everyone knows Patricia Arquette as little more than Roseanna's sister, and they only know Roseanna because she was in Desperately Seeking Susan and they only remember that because it was the only good movie that Madonna did for about ten years. Patricia spent a whole career in her sister's reflected shadow, until True Romance replaced that with a fraction of Tarantino's glory. She's had an under-utilised cuddly charm, but not much else. Here? Three words. Hepburn on mescaline. I never expected this icey charm, this nightmarish sexuality and endearing horror of a dual or deceptively singular role. It's such an unrelentingly vicious part that you can't help wondering whether someone has just come out of a particularly bad relationship. It has the stench of problems at home, if you know what I mean.
Turmoil and inner disturbance are at the core of the movie, with the result being a journey with no obvious start or finish. The title is accurate, for this is as much a road movie as Wild At Heart. The journey is more spiritual than physical, as Pullman is hijacked by an ever-accelerating descent into those dark, dark places that Lynch maps out, without ever explaining: the question to be asked is, who's steering and who's riding the gear box? Every driver has felt this way, with a sense that, when you get out of the car, everything will have changed, that nothing is constant. Lynch has caught that fifth hour of darkness, when you haven't seen a car or a light since that closed roadside bar, the only radio signal left on an empty dial seems to be a dedicated Belgian death metal station and there's no such thing as dawn. No film will ever make you want to drive so much.
Lynch's latest could well be his rebirth, a second Eraserhead, but more influenced by Hawks than Bunuel. There's something new and fresh here, but still delivered with that same Lynch flare for the amazing. It's nice to know that, at a time when Paul Verhoeven is regarded as a radical maverick, there's still people out there that are spiking the water supply with their homegrown pharmaceuticals.
Oh, yeah, and there's also the most violent and repulsively funny death since DaFoe blew his own head off in Wild At Heart while the dog ran away with the severed hand. Cheers, Dave, we've missed you.
RMW