Imperial labrynth

Movie Review: Inland Empire

Directed by David Lynch

Like Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire is a place name in that strange American fun-house of a town, Los Angeles. But instead of snaking, it sprawls, and of course it’s much farther from the comfort of shore.

So we find ourselves in Lynch’s new Dadaist horror masterpiece, which he filmed on grainy digital video and (gulp) without a script. Perhaps the plainest indication of what we’re in for is that the movie isn’t even set in its eponymous locale. Whereas Mulholland Drive had Internet message boards buzzing with theories as to its Gordian-knot plot, Inland Empire is a movie best contemplated in the Internet of one’s own dreams … or nightmares. Only here can our interpretations fail gracefully, dissolving into psychedelic fuzz or falling down rabbit holes – much as the heroine does throughout.

At the beginning of the movie, Nikki Grace, an obscure film actress (Laura Dern), lets in a strange visitor. The awkward conversation that ensues is as hilarious as it is frightening, setting the stage for all the sublime discomfort to come. The woman’s two ominous parables, one about the birth of evil and the other about a girl who gets lost at the marketplace, both nod to the freakish Hollywood world that Lynch’s movie concerns and inhabits.

Nikki has just landed a new role (enter Justin Theroux and Jeremy Irons) in a movie called On High in Blue Tomorrows, which, of course, is cursed. But we’re cursed too as we follow her through the slippery worlds of the movie set, suburban barbeques, tripped-out whorehouses, an assortment of anonymous women in trouble and an apartment inhabited by a family of catatonic rabbits. Unlike the real Inland Empire, so I’m told, this one is a very fine place to get lost. Alex Pasternack

Crash

Babel

Directed by Alejandro Iñarritu

To harsher critics, Babel might seem like just that. Mexican director Alejandro Iñarritu’s new film takes to an extreme the jumbled recipe of films like Traffic and Crash: loosely-connected storylines swirling around heavy social issues, painted in epic brushstrokes. As with his earlier Amores Perros and 21 Grams, Iñarritu adds to this his butterfly-effect existentialism, by which whatever thing happens here will end up changing the world over there. In this case, the here and there are Morocco, Tokyo and the border between the US and Mexico (each shot on location, remarkably). While only one is a literal boundary, Babel tells us that unseen borders threaten to divide us everywhere – from those people we don’t know, those we know best and even from ourselves.

Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, who play an emotionally-estranged couple on an African vacation, wear no makeup as they struggle through their own calamity, a choice that matches Iñarritu’s love of close-ups and gritty, high-contrast images of alien locales. Except for the scenes in Tokyo, the film’s most moving portion, Iñarritu’s style almost threatens to distract from the movie itself.

Though the chaos it portrays may seem bewildering and overwhelming, the movie seems to be saying that confusion is inevitable. Even if they speak the same language, people don’t hear each other, and that slightest disconnection can unleash anarchy upon the world. Alex Pasternack