jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Walt Disney Pictures distributed this 1999 film by David Lynch, and that fact — along with G rating, a plot that centers around an old man riding a lawnmower across Iowa, and a certain amount of pigheaded snobbery on my part — are the reasons I never gave The Straight Story a chance. Surely, this couldn’t be the Lynch Lynch fans crave? Grave mistake.

First of all, the movie is marvelous to look at and really drives home what a loss it is that Lynch won’t work in 35mm again. I like INLAND EMPIRE better than most, and the low-grade DV does have its charms, but if you compare it to the pristine, every-frame-is-an-art-print visuals of this movie, you can only grumble.

Grumbling is something you won’t get from Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth), the proud and stubborn 73-year-old who, after hearing that his estranged brother has suffered a stroke, decides that it’s time to reconcile. The brother’s in a hospital across the Wyoming state line, and Alvin can’t drive a car — in fact, he can barely walk or see, and he doesn’t want the help of his daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek.) So he gets on his riding mower and heads east.

What follows is indeed a straight story, following the lines of the highway and the well-delineated demands of the hero’s journey (but then again, so does INLAND EMPIRE, if you know what to look for.) Alvin meets a runaway girl, a throng of bike riders zip by, and he almost gets killed going down a hill. The way the Oscar-nominated screenplay by John Roach and Mary Sweeney manages to wring meaning and humanity from the simplest situations is a masterclass in drama: one early scene had me biting my nails because Alvin, in the slipstream of a passing 18-wheeler, lost his hat. Talk about high-stakes adventure!

How much Lynch is in all this? Apart from the absolutely beautiful cinematography by Freddie Francis, devoted Lynchians will find the master’s fingerprints all over the details: Alvin’s reckless smoking and taste for strong coffee matches Lynch’s own. The clipped but profound and folksy dialogue sounds like it could’ve come straight from his mouth, the small towns all have more than their share of small town weirdos, and in the final scene, Lynch regular Harry Dean Stanton shows his rugged face.

The Straight Story doesn’t enter any of the surreal dream spaces we’ve come to associate with Lynch’s work, but it nonetheless succeeds in taking us into a unique world that follows its own rules. The performances by Spacek and Farnsworth are top-notch. Farnsworth became the oldest actor ever to get an Oscar nomination for Best Actor; he was ill with cancer during the shoot and took his life the following year. I’ll have to rewatch this soon because I suspect it may merit a fifth star.

The Straight Story. David Lynch, 1999. ****

• Rotten Tomatoes: 95%
• The Straight Story at LynchNet.com
• The Straight Story at Wikipedia

YouTube has a great clip in which Alvin meets the Deer Woman (Barbara Robertson):

“The ambulance guys, they say, what the fuck happened here? I say, he come to reaping what he been sowing, that’s what. They say, fucker been sowing some kinda heavy shit.”

Over the course of its three bizarro hours, INLAND EMPIRE draws a lot of attention to its mode of presentation and status as physical artifact. The film opens with a shot of a movie projector cranking up and throwing a beam of flickering light into the darkness. The camera turns, and the screen becomes our screen. This is only the first of dozens of times Lynch reminds us what exactly it is we’re looking at. The magic is that it works anyway.

Because of the constant references to film as a medium, I was worried that seeing the film on DVD (available on August 14) would diminish the experience more than it usually does. But like the river you famously can’t step into twice, INLAND EMPIRE is a shape-shifter of a movie that reconstitutes itself differently every time, and my own TV screen turned out to be a fascinating place to see it.

First of all, what happens to the film’s surface is nothing less than a revelation. Lynch shot INLAND EMPIRE on cheap digital video, and it is much more at home on the small screen. The infernal glare and lousy resolution of the blown-up film are gone; the images regain something of the sensual quality that inform every frame of Mulholland Dr. At least by traditional standards, INLAND EMPIRE on DVD looks better than ever.

And while it’s true that the film opens with a projector, it only takes a few more shots before we’re in a hotel room with a woman who spends the entire movie watching TV: talking rabbits, static, Laura Dern, herself, whatever’s on. Since it continuously references both modes of presentation, INLAND EMPIRE can be said to be about Lynch’s move from film to digital, about getting lost in a media-saturated world built from competing narratives. The medium must certainly be part of the message, and the film’s interlocking stories are all framed by various acts of looking: at screens, through burn holes, through the windows of a movie set.

In this context, questions about which part is “real” and which is “just a movie” become pointless. Take the scene where Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) rehearses her role. Like Naomi Watts’ audition in Mulholland Dr., the miracle is not that an actor can summon emotion out of thin air, it’s that we feel it, too — even though it has just been revealed as a trick. All of the film’s narrative levels have the potential to affect us, and that’s why we should be afraid of the Phantom (Krzysztof Majchrzak), the shadowy Polish carnie who hypnotizes circus audiences and can simply vanish.

David Lynch distributed INLAND EMPIRE himself, and the number of people who had a chance to see it in theaters was limited. With the DVD, some of the film’s subconscious pull has been traded for bonus features and the opportunity to pour over individual scenes and fast-forward through others. (Let the obsessive analysis begin!)

“More things that happened” is Lynch’s title for 75 minutes of deleted scenes edited into a single piece, a kind of extended appendix. The new scenes offer hints and clues but also confuse matters further: Sue loses her job, the Phantom sells a watch, Laura Dern masturbates while she’s on the phone, Nastassja Kinski makes a confession, and a couple of prostitutes crash a remote controlled UFO. In other words, catnip for the converted.

The DVD also provides a gallery of still images, three trailers, and the short film “Ballerina.” A fascinating half-hour long documentary shows Lynch at work, and in another short, the filmmaker reveals his recipe for quinoa while telling a story about buying colored sugar water in Turkey. Finally, there are forty minutes of Lynch speaking about the making of Rabbits, working in Lodz, the beauty of digital editing, and where “the babies are hiding.”

INLAND EMPIRE pushes up against the outer edge of what film can do, and it drives home just how timid, unadventurous and homogenized most movies really are. It operates in an endlessly fertile space of open-ended possibility. Harry Dean Stanton’s Freddie sums it up as well as anybody:

There’s a vast network, right? An ocean of possibilities. I like dogs. I used to raise rabbits. I’ve always loved animals. Their nature, how they think. I have seen dogs reason their way out of problems, watched them think through the trickiest situations. Do you have a couple of bucks I could borrow? I’ve got this damn landlord.

INLAND EMPIRE. David Lynch, 2006. *****

• My original review from the New York Film Festival
• My second take
• Inland Empire and Transcendental Meditation
• The Sunset Boulevard Connection
• Collected Inland Empire Reviews and Resources
• Catching the Big Fish
• Dune
• Eraserhead
• Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
• Rabbits
• Mulholland Dr.
• The Official Site
• And finally, the mutant Caribbean YouTube remake known as Outlandish Republic:

Proving once again the infinite mutability of the coming-of-age tale, The Wendell Baker Story, written by Luke and co-directed by Luke and Andrew Wilson, grafts a number of borderline absurd conceits onto a ramshackle story about a small-time con-man trying to make his way in the world. In the dappled sunlight of Austin, Texas, Wendell Baker (Luke Wilson) sells fake IDs to immigrants and fails to appreciate his gorgeous girlfriend Doreen (Eva Mendes)–until he gets busted and shipped off to Huntsville Prison, where he comes across a copy of Conrad Hilton’s autobiography and decides to go into the hotel business.

But the “hotel” Wendell is sent to by his parole board is a retirement home under the command of a sadistic head nurse played by brother Owen. The inmates include Kris Kristofferson, Harry Dean Stanton, and Seymour Cassel as horny old men hiding a secret or two. With their help, Wendell has to thwart evil schemes and win back Doreen. Their adventures are thoroughly ridiculous and enjoyable, but like Doreen, we can see right through Wendell’s goofy charm. The Wendell Baker Story is silly but lovable, occasionally very funny, and no dumber than most movies at the multiplex. It’d be fascinating to see what the Wilsons might come up with if they really tried. Opens May 18.

The Wendell Baker Story. Andrew Wilson and Luke Wilson, 2005. ***

• The Wendell Baker Story at Rotten Tomatoes
• The trailer:

How do you review someone else’s bad dream? With a sprained ankle swollen to the size of a coconut, I found myself joining the other insomniacs and hardcore cinephiles at an ungodly hour to see David Lynch’s first movie in five years. His latest plumbing of the unconscious is three hours long and his first shot on crappy digital video, but not the first to play like “a wicked dream that seizes the heart,” nor is it the first featuring Laura Dern, shifting identities, and creepy characters doing truly creepy things. William H Macy announces: “Hollywood, California, where stars make dreams and dreams make stars!” After Justin Theroux, Jeremy Irons, Harry Dean Stanton deliver some hesitant exposition about a movie with a history of murder, a suburban BBQ party is overrun by Eastern European carnies, a Kafkaesque interrogator listens to Dern’s curse-word peppered confession, a gaggle of hookers dances the locomotion, and blood is vomited up on the Walk of Fame.

Inland Empire is so Lynchian that it often appears to veer into self-parody, but somehow this works for the film: like the bizarre sitcom where everybody wears a rabbit mask, the laugh track at the Walter Reade was disconcertingly out of whack. Three hours later, while the rest of America gathered for church, we were watching prostitutes lip synch Nina Simone’s “Sinner Man” while a pet monkey frolicked and a man in a red wool cap sawed a log. Remember: there are consequences to one’s actions.

Inland Empire. David Lynch, 2006. ****

• My review at worldfilm

[tags]david lynch, pet monkey, prostitutes, laura dern, 4 stars, film, surreal, bad dreams, murder, poland, harry dean stanton, justin theroux, jeremy irons, hollywood, nina simone, sprained ankle, nyff[/tags]