David Lynch's film noirish, who-am-I, Hollywood allegory starts off well enough. His direction is haunting, the film has both creepy and funny moments, and his usual cast of midgets, bizarros and freaks is not overly intrusive. Better, Lynch draws you into the intersection of two women -- one a fresh-faced ingenue hoping to make it big in Hollywood (Naomi Watts), the other a mysterious survivor of a murder attempt/car accident who has amnesia (Laura Harring). Watts is fantastic, just the right mix of clean and dirty, innocent and scarred.
It becomes clear, however, that Lynch has gotten himself in and he has no clue as to how to get himself out. So the double-doubles pile up, along with a healthy dollop of freaks, flashbacks, skitzo cuts, blurs, performance art and the like. Roger Ebert (who loved the movie) captures the problem: "Mulholland Drive" isn't like "Memento," where if you watch it closely enough, you can hope to explain the mystery. There is no explanation. There may not even be a mystery . . . . "Mulholland Drive" is all dream. There is nothing that is intended to be a waking moment. Like real dreams, it does not explain, does not complete its sequences, lingers over what it finds fascinating, dismisses unpromising plotlines . . . . This is a movie to surrender yourself to. If you require logic, see something else. "Mulholland Drive" works directly on the emotions, like music. Individual scenes play well by themselves, as they do in dreams, but they don't connect in a way that makes sense--again, like dreams. The way you know the movie is over is that it ends. And then you tell a friend, "I saw the weirdest movie last night." Just like you tell them you had the weirdest dream.
