Every once in a while, a movie comes along that I know that if I write an honest review of it, I will receive hate mail. These are usually extremely popular and/or critically respected films that I feel just don't deserve the reputation. Although I saw some of these before I started writing reviews, let's take a stroll down memory lane at some of these movies: The Tin Drum, Rushmore, The Deer Hunter, The Usual Suspects, Nosferatu: Phantom of the Night, Juliet of the Spirits, Kiss Me Deadly, sex, lies, and videotape, The Shawshank Redemption, Paris, Texas. I have a strange feeling that I can add Inland Empire to the list.
So what can I say about this movie? It's from David Lynch, whose made some great films (The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet), and some really bad ones (Dune). It's certainly not commercial- a three hour avant garde piece with only the barest threads of a story, shot on ugly DV. And for me, it was really, really boring.
Not that I have anything against the avant garde or non-narrative cinema (I loved Harmony Korine's Gummo and Lynch's own Eraserhead, for example). I just want it to be interesting. Too often (like almost all the time) Inland Empire just isn't anything it all, just Lynch throwing up weird stuff on the screen. The movie seems to hold promise at the beginning, when it appears to be setting up a plot. Laura Dern plays an actress starring in a film directed by Jeremy Irons. She learns that the project is being produced and under mysterious circumstance and a previous attempt to make resulted in the murder of its two stars. So far, so good, aside from the fact that Lynch has made the film in very poor quality digital video and uses many (presumably intentional) out of focus close-ups. But then we get into jerk-around territory that has already been mined as well as anyone can by Bergman in Persona. The boundary between actress and character is lost, and most of the rest of the involves Dern wandering endlessly around as weird stuff happens to her. There's also some stuff involving a bunch of Polish people and a family of rabbits that I didn't understand, but was not interested enough to care.
Now, I know that if I watched this movie a bunch of times I would probably be able to figure out who everyone is and put all the pieces of the puzzle together. But I didn't care. If you're going to go in a weird direction, you probably shouldn't set up a plotline that's actually interesting and then abandon it. And you shouldn't make everything so darn ugly. I had a flashback to Soderbergh's dreadful Full Frontal, which I thought was a lesson to every director that if you are going to use digital, it should at least look like something semi-professional.
Unlike some other hate mail movies I've seen I can at least understand why this might work for some people- at ninety minuets. At three hours, I have trouble seeing how anyone could make through the whole thing without copious amounts of caffeine- or more.
I would rather see Lynch's best film, The Elephant Man, five more times before I see this picture again.
Inland Empire (2006)