Thoughts On Mulholland Drive (2001)

I still have the poster for the 'Mulholland Drive' preview that came to Madison, Wi. in 2001 up in my bathroom. At this point, I was already head-over-heels for David Lynch. I had been through 'Twin Peaks' at least three times and knew his films shot for shot. Watching 'Mulholland Drive' at that point was like hearing 'OK Computer' after spending two years immersed in 'The Bends'. It was terrific. Afterwards, as my friends and I convened in the lobby of the campus theater, the conversation was awkward and somewhere on the order of, "I don't know what the fuck that was all about, but it was amazing". I would see 'Mulholland Drive' four more times in theaters around Madison and many more on video. Needless to say, I've done a lot of explaining and dealt with random theories ("It's all about the cowboy", "It's all about the look Diane's neighbor gives Rita", "What about the two very different auditions Betty gives"?). The cut-and-paste timeline and surreal sequences have thrown us all for a loop, but subsequent viewings help make wonderful sense of it all.
Here's the plot as simply as it can be laid out: Diane Selwin is a small town girl who moves to LA with dreams of stardom. She meets another ambitious beauty, Camilla, on the audition circuit and there fast friendship turns to romance. Unfortunately, Diane's passionate love is no match for Camilla's ambition. Camilla quickly gets the career Diane and her dreamed of and cements it by dumping her for a hot, young director; Adam Kesher. With little left, Diane becomes sick with sadness and hires a man to kill Camilla. She then goes to sleep and has a vivid dream: Camilla survives a horrible car accident and becomes helpless with amnesia. Diane, now a ray-of-sunshine version of herself named Betty, takes her into her aunt's dream apartment and they hide out from the evil forces of Hollywood who are frantically trying to find Camilla. With one audition, Betty becomes a highly sought after talent in Hollywood, but gives it all up to help Camilla who now desperately needs her. When she awakes, Diane realizes that Camilla is dead. That night she becomes insane with remorse and takes her own life.
'Mulholland Drive' is classic Lynch. We again have a beautiful woman in trouble, dark humor, and intense nightmares. But the film also succeeds as a great statement on the nature of dreams. The film's final act gives us all the characters first laid out in the dream so that we can see what Diane did with them. In real life, she sits and listens to Adam Kesher laugh off his profitable divorce. In the dream, he's broken-hearted and humiliated by his wife's affair with the pool man (a hilarious Billy Ray Cyrus). In real life, he's a high-powered director who halted her career and stole her girlfriend. In the dream, he has control of his film and his life taken from him. Adam and Camilla's dinner party, which would prove Diane's undoing, becomes the most significant factor in her dream. The man staring at her over espresso would become the espresso-obsessed film broker during Kesher's unfortunate meeting in her dream. Kesher's mother, Coco, who treats Diane with pitying condescension, becomes a motherly landlord who looks out for her. And, of course, a brief glimpse of a cowboy would become a hilariously terrifying figure in Betty's Hollywood. Diane's dream would also transform the long, fateful limo ride to the party into a violent revenge on Camilla for breaking her heart. Her meeting with the hitman at Winkie's would later turn out to be both a hilarious sequence of a killing/robbery gone endlessly wrong and a brilliant scene about terrible nightmares coming true.
Maybe Lynch was railing against ABC for turning down the initial pilot that Lynch would have to re-shoot for a feature length film, but 'Mulholland Drive' is also an oddly genius satire on the absurdity of Holllywood politics. The Cowboy, the manipulative casting agent, the man with tiny head, and the mysterious phone calls are all objects of ridicule as it seems there's no logic or humanity in the way things work in tinseltown. We'll never know what kind of TV show Mulholland Drive would have made, but I thank god it didn't happen for it would have cost us arguably his best film. Look for the scene at Club Silencio, the look between Adam and Betty, and the botched hit for examples of cinematic gold.

Margot At The Wedding

Noah Baumbach is truly becoming an auteur in his own right. His films are instantly identifiable: little to no non-diagetic music, subjects are middle class artists or children of middle class artists, themes of dysfunctional family dynamics and awkward sexual discoveries, hand-held cameras, etc. Like Andrew Bujalski, he's a rare new breed of auteur who favors character study over plot and breaks down cinematic conventions in an effort to put us directly into the dynamics between his characters.
His most recent offering again deals with the raw pain and awkward humor that comes with living in a family of selfishness and eccentricity. Margot is a renowned poet who takes her pre-pubescent son, Claude, to the wedding of her estranged sister, Pauline. Baumbach writes her childishly selfish and manipulative dialouge as if he endured such similar parenting. Very much like the relationship between Walt and Frank in 'The Squid and the Whale', the film finds Claude at a crucial moment in his relationship with his mother: he adores her, but is becoming mature enough to see how she poisons him with put-downs-all the while showering him with affection. Fortunately for us, no one else is spared Margot's abuse. After receiving a gift in the form of slippers from her estranged husband, all she can tell him later is that she already has a pair and that they make her feel like he doesn't know her anymore. Later, while riding in a car with a woman hysterical over her wounded dog, Margot cannot help herself from saying how annoyed she is. Pauline and her unemployed fiance, Malcolm, immediately become Margot's target. The visit becomes an exercise in endurance as Margot endlessly tells Pauline how unworthy he is of her. And, in an act of kinship after years of estrangement, Pauline confides in Margot her pregnancy which she has kept from everyone else. It's not long before Margot spreads the news like a dirty little secret.
So much of the film rests on the effortlessly natural chemistry between Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh. They bicker, giggle, and whisper so well that it seems as if they've been acting together for years. After spending so many years in a considerable career decline, it seems as if the only reason Leigh got the role of Pauline was because her husband wrote and directed the film. Whatever the case, its a great to see her again. Not enough can be said of Nicole Kidman. As Margot, she transverses masterfully from ice cold cruelty and casual manipulation to childlike crying fits and "I didn't do anything wrong" shock. If only she didn't let her Australian accent slip so many times, this would have been a perfect performance.
Noah Baumbach is something of a contradiction. He seems so destined to remove the viewer from any sense of movie watching that he deletes cinematic elements that are so basic to common filmmaking. For all his good intentions though, this just leaves the viewer feeling more left out. He heavily cuts his scenes so that no shot lasts longer than a few seconds. The intention is to leave the viewer feeling uncomfortable and out of breath. We do, but over-cutting just leads to an overall feeling of interruption. Baumbach also transitions from scene to scene with a kind of improvisational style all his own. Establishing shots are rare, so we're always suddenly thrust into the middle of the next scene. This surely succeeds on a humor level (see the tree climbing scene), but often there's no way for us to reconcile the action we were just in the middle of - especially if the scene peaks at the end. Well, he may be a contradiction, but at least there's a popular American filmmaker out there taking considerable chances.

Iron Man

I thought the success of 'Batman' in 1989 or 'Superman' in 1978 would have set off a chain of other comic book adaptations, the likes of which we've seen in the last decade. Now that the most memorable comic book heroes have been brought to the big screen, it seems the die-hards are digging through their collections to find other ways of cashing in on the craze. Iron Man, though one of my favorite action figures as a boy, is not a particularly classic character to outsiders like myself. I knew nothing of his past, his villians, his struggles, or causes; but this all becomes irrelevant as the film is sympathetic to beginners like myself. Our hero is Tony Stark, and his suit was designed to help him escape from the clutches of a hostile army of Afghanis. Stark, once a billionaire weapons designer and endlessly charismatic playboy, becomes destined to use his money and genius to stop the destruction his own weapons have caused. This becomes at odds with his partner, Obadiah Stane, whose determination to build and sell weapons unravels him as a ruthless tyrant.
As expected, 'Iron Man' has its fair number of dizzying action. Whether battling Stane's evil prototype in the streets, soaring through the sky, or flying across the world to save an Afghani village; director Jon Favreau (yep, the auteur/mopester from 'Swingers') obviously had fun bringing the action to the big screen. Its debatable, but the action may be second only to watching the always charming Downey and endlessly magnetic Jeff Bridges. Like Michael Keaton in 'Batman', Downey seemed an unusual choice. Not exactly a tough guy and entering middle-age, he didn't seem the obvious choice for a super hero. As usual though, he can carry a film like one. His ability to rattle-off one-liners is put to good use here as a man who can charm Maxim models as well as Marines and reporters who hate what he does. The last time we've seen Bridges as a bad guy may have been 1985's 'Jagged Edge'. His wide-grin and warm eyes that have made him such a classic leading man work just as well here. As Obadiah Stane, he takes us on a brilliant ride from Stark's close old friend and partner, to bad influence, to subtly terrifying foe. In one scene, Stane uses his demonic new device to paralyze Stark, before calmly and quietly removing his artificial heart for his own destructive prototype. Here Bridges uses his easy-going voice and mastery in understatement so that we can practically feel his breath on our ears.
The only thing out of place is the melodramatic dialouge during the final fight sequence and Stark's anticipation of it. There's just something not right about watching real cinematic talent recite sophomoric, comic book melodrama; but then maybe that's just part of the fun. Look for a cameo by Peter Billingsley (Ralphie from 'A Christmas Story') who also serves as Executive Producer.