Movie Review: Mulholland Drive (2001)

A Hollywood mystery, Mulholland Drive throws plenty of style and inconsequential abstractions at the screen.

In Hollywood, an unknown woman who later adopts the name Rita (Laura Elena Harring) survives an abduction and a car crash along Mulholland Drive, but loses her memory. She takes refuge in a temporarily empty apartment, where soon the perky Betty (Naomi Watts) arrives, a newcomer to town intent on starting her Hollywood career.

Film director Adam (Justin Theroux) is having a bad day. He is forced by shadowy financiers to cast an actress he does not know as the lead in his new movie, then he catches his wife cheating with the poolman and is thrown out of his own home.

Meanwhile, Rita and Betty become friends, and find a large amount of cash and a mysterious blue key in Rita's handbag. She starts having memory flashes, which lead the pair to a grisly discovery. Betty also nails her first audition, and briefly meets Adam. But Rita and Betty's troubles are just starting, and two other women called Diane and Camilla will enter the picture.

A rejected television pilot expanded into an incomprehensible mess of a feature film, Mulholland Drive is two thirds of a decent movie. Director and writer David Lynch conjures up a Hollywood dream/nightmare combination in the story of naive but talented Betty meeting the dark and damaged Rita. The initial 90 minutes, while containing plenty of dead-ends, abandoned incidents and characters meant to be developed later in the television series, offers plenty of promise, despite the cheap amnesia plot device.

Beyond the bounds of the rejected material, Lynch slaps on a further 45 minutes of dream-like, barely coherent concepts, and takes Mulholland Drive to the land of impenetrable theory where any explanation goes and none are satisfactory. The carefully constructed plot is all but abandoned, actresses Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring take on new roles, and the movie wanders off into mythology of its own making.

The parts of the film that make sense are infused with a smooth vibe and play on the metaphor of Hollywood as a field of dreams with a dark underbelly. The less coherent portions are all about the distorted haze of broken dreams, shattered promises and betrayal most foul. While there is some fun to be had in kicking around diverse interpretations, the totality of the film is disrespectful in its cavalier attitude towards its own characters and events.

By the end of the seemingly endless 146 minutes the pieces of Mulholland Drive lie scattered on the boulevard of broken dreams. The puzzle can be assembled into any number of pictures, but they are all distorted by bumptious storytelling.

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