Inland Empire (2006)

Inland Empire is a film so utterly wretched, plodding, haphazard, sloppy, and dull it boggles the mind that an acclaimed, talented, and experienced director decided it would be a good idea to even helm it, let alone release it on an unsuspecting public, one use to his work being of a superior, if strange and inscrutable, and, dare I say, surrealistic bent. David Lynch, however, helmed and then proudly released this two-hour and fifty-nine-minute cinematic torture device. He seemed perplexed that his typical audience, many of them, didn't "get it."

The film features Laura Dern as "Nikki Grace" an actress that lives in a mansion in Beverly Hills and is visited by some weird old woman played by Grace Zabriskie who warns her in cryptic terms of "brutal fucking murder." The acting is catatonic if not laughable--but maybe this is intentional. Oh, we also had a beginning with characters in another dimension wearing huge rabbit heads in some blue-walled and dimly-lighted Depression-era flat, mouthing non-sequiturs while they look in on a man in Poland visiting a prostitute. So there.

Nikki gets a part in a remake of a film called (are you ready for this?), On High in Blue Tomorrows, which is a remake of a Polish film called in German (why German?) Vier, Sieben, or "4,7". Her co-star in this is Justin Theroux as "Devon Berk," whose acting as a Southern cad in a Southern melodrama of a Polish film with a German title is...just bad. Anyway, the director, "Kingsley Amis" (Jeremy Irons, who puts in the only good performance here) tells them cryptically "There was something wrong with the story," and that both of the leads were murdered. Okay. On the set, Harry Dean Stanton delivers cryptic, non-sequitur lines of gibberish about rabbits and landlords, and borrows money. All of the performances are annoying and phony and flat and the film is dismal. I mean, cheap, ugly, boring, pointless, flat, affected surrealism with nothing inspired or dream-like except I've had dreams this pointless and they weren't worth making motion pictures about.

Then we have Nastassja Kinski as a Polish prostitute who gets murdered by a man and more prostitutes who dance the locomotion. Laura Dern ambles around as if in a daze, looking at strange things, doing little "vignettes." (There is one interesting Kafkaesque scene wherein she goes up to an office cubby where a man in crooked glasses seems to be interviewing her for a psychological assessment, and she proceeds to put on a trailer trash accent and hold a bloody screwdriver while her face is covered in bruises and talks about "I was screwing a couple of guys for drinks," and "he'd fuck the shit out of you!" What? Huh? Who? How does this random piece (which repeats) have any significance for the rest of this film?)

No focus whatsoever.

There is a shadowy guy called Smithy or the Phantom who is Laura Dern's husband in the film, or in On High, or in Europe as a sex trafficker, or as a poor couple in a white trash house that may simply be part of the film, and Mary Steenbergen comes over with a bad arm and says something that seems meaningless, and we plod through this film which goes back and forth between Poland in the Twenties or Thirties, darkened hallways, a movie set, rabbit-headed phantoms from another dimension, and a few images that jump out with stretched mouths and white faces in slow motion and loud, screeching noises.

There are one or two other interesting scenes, like a group of Polish circus performers who pour out of a backdoor in a suburban home like something from a Fellini picture, and there is the eerie suggestion of reincarnation, ripper murders, sex slavery, mind control, what-have-you. The film, like a virus, gets into your head and wants to assemble something coherent out of the disaster unfolding on the screen. So it is a film that torments you after you've sat through almost three HOURS of this...film.

Laura Dern gets stabbed with a screwdriver while carrying a lightbulb that has previously been in the mouth of a man who killed a prostitute in Poland in a past life who was a circus performer or something. She collapses amid homeless people whose acting is even worse than something from a poverty row picture from the Thirties. She has an absurd look on her face, and then Kingsley yells cut, and she goes to her trailer; do I need to go on?

In the end, we have cameos from Naomi Watts and Laura Harring from Mulholland Drive, a guy sawing a piece of wood, and a monkey. A girl with a wooden leg comes on and says, "sweet" (har har a play on words, they're in a hotel "suite"). There are scenes here so ineptly filmed it's hard to believe they were directed by a man that was once nominated, multiple times, for an Academy Award (Laura Dern, at one point, steps backward through a yard, almost stepping on a metal paint tray or something; and Lynch didn't feel it was necessary to do a retake). But was it intentional? Are we supposed to take the ineptitude as having some larger significance? Aren't dreams utterly illogical, and often messy? This film gnaws away at your brainpan like a worm, pitting your disbelief at its wretchedness with your assurance that there MUST be some deeper meaning buried here--you're just not getting it.

But, even so, it's virtually unwatchable rubbish.

However, I've seen it multiple times now; because, well, I can't get it out of my head. Something is being communicated here; I just, maybe, can't decipher it. But then, I'm a sucker for a mystery.

Unfortunately, this film invites suckers in and lets them be sucked clean. And afterward, you either leave feeling puzzled, angry, or cheated.

Inland Empire is bad, make no mistake. But a ready-made DADA toilet seat appropriated as "art" is likewise. Was Lynch trying to torpedo himself? Is his art just "burned out"? Or is all of this a sly joke, a buried message, an intentional parody of the various "selves" we create and that are created for us, by our mental landscape?

We may never know. But in our minds, we may still wrestle with it. Whether or not this is what Lynch means by the term Inland Empire is another question, one that will also never be answered.

And maybe that's for the best.