Mulholland Drive (2001) review

*contains spoilers*

I used to hate this movie and now I just think it's okay - it has some good moments but overall the payoff isn't good enough. It's also one of the most overrated films ever.

First I'll write about what I like about Mulholland Drive. It's not a boring film like most arthouse movies. The mystery and the unusual tone of the film keeps your interest. I like the weird moments such as the guy at Winkie's diner who is telling his friend about a nightmare that ends up becoming true. Or the awkward moment where the mobster is drinking his espresso (that's supposed to be highly recommended) and he spits it out onto a napkin. Another clever moment is when Betty is rehearsing with Rita and you are caught off guard because you think they are fighting with each other but then the camera pulls back and you see them reading from a script. The acting in the film is pretty good, especially Naomi Watts and Justin Theroux. It's not the typical wooden, soap opera acting that Lynch likes to use.

The part of the films where I start to lose my patience is when Betty and Rita inexplicably have sex. The first time I saw this I lost my patience and didn't watch the rest. I get it that this scene is still part of the dream sequence section of the movie (most people, at least, agree on this opinion) but it's very strange and gaudy. It reminds me of a 90's Cinemax softcore porn film. Things get even weirder when the girls go to "Club Silencio". This scene drags out endlessly and I'm not certain what the point of this is except maybe to clue Betty into the fact things aren't what they seem and that she is dreaming. It's a very self-indulgent Lynchian scene. He's obsessed with melodramatic moments with lounge singers and Roy Orbison. If any other director put this in their film they would be ridiculed.

Betty discovers a blue box in her purse that matches a key that Rita had put away for safe keeping earlier in the film. The box is symbolic of something important - one theory is that it represents a vault for her guilt. Many things in the film have symbolic value which is fine to a point. In this film it begins to irritate me because not everything can be symbolic and sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Critics, of course, get a boner of this stuff because it's thought of as intellectual and sophisticated.

Betty awakens from her dreams after Rita opens the blue box and we see that she's a different person with another name. This is very Lynchian as well - in Lost Highway a character transforms into a completely different actor midway through the story. Betty is now Diane, a struggling actress, and Rita is now Camilla, a successful actress. The last act of film is (supposedly) reality but there are still moments that are annoyingly and confusingly dreamlike - why does Camilla walk Diane up to the Hollywood house by taking her through a roundabout path? And why do we see the blue box again in Diane's drawer?

You might be thinking, "yeah, but it's an arthouse film" and I will agree to a point. I will also counter that European directors in the 1960's already out-Lynched David Lynch with movies like "Persona" and "Last Year at Marienbad" - those movies deal with the nature of reality and doppelgängers and they are very challenging to watch. This movie really isn't that unique - it takes European arthouse sensibilities and combines them with the style of American noir like "Sunset Blvd." and "Kiss Me Deadly".

There is a well-crafted moment where Diane and Camilla are topless and a couch and some props are moved around on the coffee table to show that this scene is a flashback. There are other good scenes that reveal characters, items and phrases we saw earlier, in a different form, during the dream sequence of the film. That is where the movie, in my opinion, really shines and works well on a 2nd viewing.

The biggest problem for me with this movie, other than the endless symbolism, is the end scene. It's very lazy to just have Diane kill herself and reminded me of the end of "The Room". The whole thing with the miniature old people is very stupid too and I still hate the first minute of the movie where there is a jitterbug contest in front of a blue screen and then the bullshit old people (who are they other than people she meets in her dream at the airport?). I don't buy that Diane won a jitterbug contest (this isn't 1940) and then decided to parlay her jitterbug dance skills in Hollywood as an actress. Don't even get me started on who the fuck the woman is who says "silencio" at the conclusion of the movie, what does the filthy bum really represent or if Aunt Ruth truly is dead.

Anyway, "silencio" and "no hay banda".