Movie Notes: Inland Empire
= 1 star
Starring Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons
Directed by David Lynch
Synopsis
While filming a strange movie, actress Nikki (Laura Dern) embarks on a journey into the bizarre.
The Good
- Laura Dern — such a trooper — is able to handle every twisted idea thrown her way.
- Lynch serves up the expected horrifying moments: the obligatory red curtain, bizarre lighting, and overlapping plot elements (watch that screwdriver). He also employs a few notably uncomfortable techniques like extreme closeups and the awkwardly bright colors of the digital video format.
- Brief vignettes of rabbits in a turquoise room with an inappropriate laugh track, which suggests anthropomorphic memories of our childhood and the rote mechanizations of sitcoms.
The Bad
- Overall, I feel the digital video format as used here, had more downsides than benefits. There are loads of pointless shots, extreme closeups, shaky hand held camera shenanigans, and poor lighting — essentially, David Lynch home movies.
- The acting is mostly capable but generally on the stilted side. I blame this all on Lynch, who started this film with no screenplay and would just hand scripts out on the day of photography. I don’t think the experiment worked.
- Too much strange, inexplicable stuff for my taste. The plot has something to wtih an actress filming a movie where the lead actors died, gets involved with her co-worker, gets confused with the character she plays then ends up on some journey with involvement in a European prostitution ring. But there’s an equal amount of stuff thrown in there that contradicts what I just wrote, and most likely everything is symbolic. But as with Lost Highway, I’m entirely unmotivated to figure it out, as I felt no love for these characters or the odd situations they were in, and there most likely is no explanation anyway.
Conclusion
Inland Empire was occasionally interesting for its experimental weirdness but often unbearable in regards to everything else. I wouldn’t even consider it a film in the everyday sense of the word — it’s a series of amusing, and sometimes horrifying ideas, of interest to only the most hardcore Lynch fans. Otherwise, skip it.
Next David Lynch Movie:
Previous David Lynch Movie: Mulholland Drive
IMDB: Inland Empire
Wikipedia: Inland Empire
Rotten Tomatoes: Inland Empire 70%