Inland Empire

When I left the AFI on Tuesday night after finally getting to see Inland Empire, I remember thinking, "I've never seen anything like this!" and "That just blew Lost Highway right out of the water!" It's taken me several days to figure out just how to approach a review of this film, because the more I thought about it, the less I thought I'd be able to write a conventional review—because Inland Empire is by no means a conventional movie! As I said in my earlier write-up, I genuinely think that this film will become David Lynch's magnum opus, because in watching Inland Empire, I think I've witnessed the height of Lynch's genius and vision . . . or instead, I may actually have witnessed a great turning point in his filmography, a new and exciting step forward into cinematic surrealism.

Because Inland Empire is largely that, surreal, and not so much about a traditional narrative story. Instead, this film is an experience, a ride that we must all take when sitting down to view it. And like all good art, we must draw our own conclusions about what we see. We must give our own interpretation to the events on screen . . . or maybe we don't have to interpret at all. Maybe all we need to do is feel.

I can honestly say, I've never seen a film quite like this, and I'm genuinely in awe of what Lynch has created.

The tagline for Inland Empire is, "A woman in trouble." For a 3-hour movie, that's a pretty vague description. I mean, you'd think that the marketers could give us a better teaser than that, right? But in the end, it really is descriptive enough of the film. Just those four words sum up all things in this movie, and the rest is left up to us, the viewers, to decipher.

As I said earlier, instead of a narrative storyline, we have a series of vignettes that switch back and forth, appearing and reappearing at different times, with the same actors taking on new roles in each vignette—yet all vignettes are ever so subtly tied together, with tiny little bits of information carrying over from one to the next. The film starts out in a darkened room where two people are speaking somewhat seductively to each other in what at first sounds like Russian, but we soon learn it's Polish. It's much too dark to make out who each person is, but you can notice that their faces are blurred out (which reminded me of a similar scene from Mulholland Dr.). Then a few moments later, you see a young woman, presumably the same one who spoke seductively in Polish earlier. She's wrapped in a blanket and crying, her tear-streaked face focused intently on the TV—and on the TV, we see a family of rabbits sitting around in their living room. Only these aren't really rabbits . . . they're more like human beings with rabbit heads, only moving about with such deliberation and slowness that you half-wonder if they're on Valium. When the scene of the rabbit family is shown on the full movie screen, though, the only thing you have to remind yourself that this is from TV is the laugh-track of a studio audience.

And from this little vignette, we then move into a daytime scene, with a wobbly-looking old lady meandering through driveways towards what looks like a mansion. When she rings the bell and is given entrance to the house, she introduces herself as the new neighbor to Laura Dern, whom we learn is actress Nikki Grace who's waiting around for the results of her recent audition. This old lady sits down for coffee with Nikki, and begins to talk in very cryptic tones to her, sounding more ominous and unnerving with each breath. At the end of their conversation, she points to a couch at the far end of the room, where she says that Nikki will be sitting tomorrow . . . and that's when we cut to a scene of Nikki doing just that, sitting on the couch at the far end of the room, joined by her friends when the phone rings to tell her that she's landed her role.

Here, the story begins to take on a slight linear progression as Nikki begins the process of learning her new role with her co-star, poontang-chaser Devon Berk, played by Justin Theroux (whom we may remember as Adam Kesher from Mulholland Dr.). Jeremy Irons filled in as their director, and Harry Dean Stanton was downright hilarious as the director's assistant, ever so subtly conning money of off everyone who stopped to talk to him. Things progress linearly while they began rehearsing their roles for Blue Tomorrows (the film they're working on together), right up until the point where the two of them, against their better judgment, finally jump into the sack (laughably so, I might add). That's when Inland Empire starts to branch out in multiple directions. Characters change at will, walk in and out of vignettes, sometimes viewing themselves from previous vignettes, almost as if from another reality. Some of the common vignettes that appear:

• 1940s Poland, with the girl from the beginning talking to a man about the untimely death of someone they both knew
• Nikki going up a long flight of stairs and finding a man in an abandoned room at the top, where she approaches him for a "job" she has for him, and ends up spilling a long life story about her background (which rotates between downright hilarious and surprisingly unnerving)
• What looks like a backyard barbecue of poor people, Nikki and her husband among them—and there's even an appearance of the spooked-out man from the infamous "Room to Dream" clip that's been frequently mistaken for a clip from Inland Empire (the same house and back yard are used in both)
• A motel room filled with several young women, who we slowly learn are prostitutes and Nikki's friends, though Nikki never says a thing in any of these scenes, almost like she isn't even there
• People looking at each other through the TV screen of the Polish girl from the beginning
• A brief reappearance of Devon Berk, only in his Blue Tomorrows role Billy, with Nikki arguing heatedly with his wife, Nikki declaring that she loves Billy, and Billy's wife smacking Nikki around
• Nikki, on the street, getting stabbed with a screwdriver by Billy's wife, and Nikki collapsing on the sidewalk surrounded by homeless people—who then proceed to have long conversations about bus fares to nearby cities while Nikki's dying beneath them

There's almost nothing that ties these various vignettes together, save for a few very minor details that flow from one vignette to the next . . . but somehow Lynch manages to make them all flow together seamlessly, naturally. If this had been constructed by any other director, it would have been an ungodly mess, but Lynch made it all work beautifully.

Granted, Lynch had plenty of time to work on this film, as he largely improvised the whole thing. The way I understand it, he had the basic idea for the film, started shooting one day with a freshly-written scene, and each day would write a new scene just before shooting it. In essense, Lynch never had a full movie script; it was just a day-to-day creation, so not a single person working on Inland Empire knew how the story would progress—not even Lynch himself! It does have a strong improvisational feel to it, but in a way, it lends to the overarching mystery behind the film. Lynch also filmed Inland Empire entirely in digital video, which has now become his gold standard—though I felt it lent many of the scenes a distinct camcorder look. In this age of high-definition everything, this will surely rub many people the wrong way, but I read that Lynch prefers digital video for the effects that it can lend to a scene. And when I think of his standard effects shots, his rationale makes sense.

I've never been a great fan of Laura Dern, I have to confess. In fact, I found her purity, as it were, in Blue Velvet quite annoying. Here in Inland Empire, though, she was downright phenomenal! Much like Naomi Watts in Mulholland Dr., Laura Dern brought enormous life and power to a role that had to have been immeasurably difficult. Too bad an Oscar nomination wasn't in the cards for her.

Even knowing that this was a David Lynch film, it's still an ingrained habit to look for a linear, tangible plot, even though I know one is very unlikely to be there. Inland Empire is like an abstract painting put to film—or in keeping with the vignette-style narrative, a book of poems put to film. Though if your heart is set on giving it an interpretation, one possible way to interpret these vignettes is that they're all random scenes from Nikki's film Blue Tomorrows. Or maybe the Polish scenes were depicting the story of the previous actors who tried to make Blue Tomorrows. Or were the rabbits just something seen on TV by the Polish girl, or like Lost Highway, do they represent a part of Nikki's subconscious? What exactly is Nikki's relation to the Polish girl at the end? All these questions, we'll probably never know the answers to . . . because as with all Lynch films, we're not supposed to know. We're just supposed to enjoy the experience, the thrilling ride that is a David Lynch film.

10 out of 10, with mandatory future viewings—although since Inland Empire has now run its course in DC theaters, I guess future viewings will only happen when it hits DVD. Like I said before, Lynch outdid himself by miles with this film, easily blowing Lost Highway out of the water, and I'm very eager to see where he takes the film medium from here. Utter, utter brilliance.