By Richard Rayner
Harper's Bazaar, February 01, 1997
-
It seems almost unfair to berate a brilliant filmmaker who has so obviously
been floundering and flailing, but if, like me, you long to see David
Lynch return to the weird mastery of Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and
those early episodes of Twin Peaks, then his new movie, Lost Highway,
will ultimately prove another disappointment - fascinating at first,
but messy, confusing, and even infuriating by the end. There's enough
plot here for 10 stories. It's as if Lynch and cowriter Barry Gifford
couldn't decide which one to make, confirming the trouble Lynch finds
himself in right now, bound and condemned by the blazing originality
of his own earlier vision.
Lost Highway is at its best in the thoroughly spooky first 40 minutes.
Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) is a jazz saxophonist, wild and crazy
onstage, Prozac-mellow by day. He's married to a languorous sexpot,
Renee (Patricia Arquette), with whom he lives in less than wedded
bliss, their sterile Hollywood Hills home reflecting the strained
emotional space between them. Something's very wrong, even though
they don't quite know what, and then videos start arriving on the
doorstep, next to their carefully furled copies of the morning paper.
The first video merely shows the house's exterior. Subsequent ones
start revealing the interior, as if tracking the course of a crime
yet to be committed, and since Lynch cunningly hasn't let you in on
the exact topography of the house, you never see how all its corridors
and levels connect to one another. With no fuss at all, Lynch makes
this bland physical space a place of terror, the way he did with Isabella
Rossellini's apartment in Blue Velvet. This is moviemaking of the
highest order, recalling Psycho or Polanski's Repulsion.
Then the crime apparently does happen: Fred is on death row, condemned,
but with no memory of having killed his wife, and it's here that
the story zooms off the rails, taking the first of many - far too
many - campy twists. A transforming light arrives in the cell, and
when a guard looks in the next morning, Fred is gone - vanished. Back
in the outside world, the movie now follows a car mechanic, Pete (Balthazar
Getty). When a gangster's moll, also played by Arquette, shimmies
into his body shop, we gather that Pete has become Fred's guilty alter
ego. Arquette is bleached blonde now, all legs and lingerie, strutting
on platform soles of improbable thickness, the sort of femme fatale
Fred feared his wife might be. She soon seduces Pete and persuades
him to commit a robbery so that she can get away from her boyfriend
(Robert Loggia), who is gibbering with his goons in the background.
She's steering Pete toward some sort of vengeful retribution, meanwhile
changing the color of her nails more often than the plot does directions,
which is saying something, since there are so many layers, so many
shifts, dead-ends, and detours.
Blue Velvet was one of the great films of the '80s, dream stuff, nightmare
stuff, all the more terrifying because we didn't know where it was
coming from or where it was taking us. Here the destination is also
unknown, though determined by the constraints of genre. Lynch has
swapped his highly personal vision of the violence seething beneath
the crust of apple-pie America for something much broader and simpler
- noir - and the exchange does justice neither to him nor to an honorable
narrative tradition. He doesn't seem to respect the thriller form
enough to make his refinement of it convince in the loving, knowing
manner of, say, Tarantino. Is Lost Highway the condemned man's guilty
fantasy? The dream of a man on the run? No answer is provided, and
in the end I didn't much care. It would be generous to call this willfully
baffling movie postmodern; really, like Wild at Heart, it's another
flashy, searching gesture, almost a loss of nerve, despite the blood
and the sometimes-nasty sex, despite the supertrendy soundtrack and
a stellar supporting cast that includes Richard Pryor, Gary Busey,
Robert Blake, and the radiant Natasha Gregson Wagner.
|