The Frame

Laura Dern turns in a tour-de-force performance in David Lynch’s most surreal, mind-boggling film yet (I say, though I haven’t yet seen Wild at Heart or Lost Highway), playing actress Nikki who’s hoping to make a film comeback in a soapy southern melodrama–a remake whose original was never completed because its actors were murdered, supposedly due to a curse on the story. Before long, Nikki’s identity starts to merge with that of her character, Sue Blue, and from then on, we get a kaleidoscopic montage of scenes, images, pieces of plot, pieces of other plots, further fragmentation of characters, and random musical interjections that defies any sort of linear exposition. While Mullholland Drive, which this film resembles in a number of ways, is ultimately comprehensible at some level once you’ve got the key to it, after two viewings and weeks of reading and thinking about INLAND EMPIRE, I’m more and more convinced that there is no way to fully understand it on a cognitive level. But that doesn’t mean it’s incomprehensible and incoherent–it simply uses a sort of holistic, thematic logic that doesn’t try to make every little bit fit into some puzzle pattern dictated by the norms of narrative storytelling, but recognizes the surreal effect of the whole, which is tremendous. (I think I can explicate it a little more fully than this, though, which I may do in the longer post…but I would still refuse to say my interpretation was the “right” one, or that there could be such a thing.) If you like David Lynch films (especially Mulholland Drive), don’t miss this one. If you don’t…you may not enjoy INLAND EMPIRE, but I hesitate to say “stay away” as I’ve seen some reviewers do, because there’s something special going on here.
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