Sailer on Lynch

Steve Sailor's early review of the new David Lynch nightmarescape, Inland Empire, is worth reading:

The basic structure of the film is promising, resembling the setup for a complicated Tom Stoppard play. Dern plays a classy Hollywood actress married to a jealous Polish millionaire. She lands a big role in a Southern Gothic film about adulterous lovers and the husband who will kill them if he finds out. Her leading man is a Colin Farrell-type star notorious for sleeping with all his leading ladies, especially the married ones. Not surprisingly, you soon can't tell whether the love scenes depict the characters in the film-within-a-film, or whether the stars are rehearsing a little too realistically in their spare time.

But Sailor, unlike AICN's Moriarty, doesn't come away satisfied:

A half hour into the film, my hopes were high. But then … the story never develops any momentum. And it just goes on and on and on forever and a day. You know the last ten minutes of "2001," where the astronaut keeps walking into strange rooms, staring in puzzlement at different versions of himself? Well, multiply that by 18 and you'll grasp what this three-hour disaster is like: Laura Dern walking into scores of rooms and staring in horror at what she sees. But there isn't much that's all that horrible to look at, so the film doesn't even offer the amusements of a horror film. The soundtrack consists of endless minor key chords and thump-thump heartbeat-like percussion, which is pretty creepy for awhile, but gets old eventually. Lynch himself seems to get bored with this, and keeps introducing characters that don't fit into his already overstuffed four-level structure.

I can see how this could become tedious, tiresome, or difficult to watch, but with Lunch involved, that's always a possibility. In a way, Sailer's review just piques my curiosity. Lynch's movies can be frustrating because they seem to promise interesting stories and concepts, they don't really capitalize on them. Instead, Lynch is concerned with creating intuitive, imagistic portrayals of fragmented subconscious, often with unexpected, unplanned results (and, as Moriarty revealed, most of this movie was totally unplanned). It's an altogether different focus, one that doesn't necessarily lend itself to accessibility: Most directors tell us stories; Lynch paints dreams.

Addendum: David Edelstein seems to think similarly, acknowledging that it's a dense, willfully obtuse head scratcher, but, well, he kind of thinks that's a good thing:

I remembered, watching Inland Empire, why Twin Peaks began to hemorrhage viewers in its second season. There are really enough distorted lenses, absurd non sequiturs, portentous warnings, and inexplicable symbols for ten canceled TV shows. And yet … and yet … Lynch serves up enough irrationally disturbing images for 100 classic Asian horror films, and the bedraggled Dern is so overflowingly open that you can’t dismiss the movie as an arty exercise.