Mulholland Drive began life as a television pilot. When it didn’t get picked up, writer/director David Lynch retooled it for a feature length movie. Because of that, it is often fragmented and disjointed. You could tell he probably wanted to flesh things out more if it had gone to series. However, some things might have worked better if it was spread over a season of television instead of crammed into a two-and-a-half-hour movie. It sometimes feels like you’re working on a puzzle that has pieces from an entirely different puzzle that somehow wound up in box. That’s part of the fun though.
Betty (Naomi Watts) is a wide-eyed gal fresh off the bus who comes to Hollywood hoping to be a star. She finds an amnesiac named Rita (Laura Elena Harring) in her apartment and tries to help her regain her memory and find out why she’s carrying a purse loaded with hundred-dollar bills. Meanwhile, a young hotshot director (Justin Theroux) is enraged when shadowy guys in business suits start ordering arbitrary changes to his new film.
Mulholland Drive has Lynch working with themes he’s dabbled in before. This one is more successful than some (like Lost Highway) and not quite as good as others (like Blue Velvet). However, like Lost Highway, the film kinda falls apart when the actors do a switcheroo on their parts. (Or more accurately about the time when Watts and Harring go to Club Silencio.) It’s like the movie begins to unravel right when the mystery does.
Still, when Lynch finds the sweet spot between surreal neo-noir and waking dream, the results are often electric. The stuff with Theroux as the stymied director dealing with hostile forces trying to sabotage his movie seems as though it was deeply personal for Lynch. His scenes with “The Cowboy” are particularly memorable.
Watts is excellent as the naive gal who instantly finds mystery waiting for her in La-La Land. You can tell she was destined to be a star from the very first scene. Harring is great too as the sultry amnesiac, and her love scenes with Watts are quite eye-opening. Theroux has many good scenes as well as the put-upon auteur, even if it feels like his story never gets resolved. There are also memorable bits by Dan Hedaya, Rena Riffel, Chad Everett, James Karen, and even (gasp!) Billy Ray Cyrus.
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