If this were 90 minutes it would be entertaining. As is: the negatives are about balanced with the positives. Recut it or go all out with a 12 hour version projecting simultaneously on multiple screens or something.
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Jordan Hoffman is a New York-based writer and film critic working for The Guardian, Vanity Fair, Thrillist, Times of Israel, NY Daily News and elsewhere.
He is the host of ENGAGE: The Official Star Trek Podcast, a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and challenges you to a game of backgammon.
How do you feel about the video to film transfer?; we are using the same sony camera and I’ve yet had a chance to see it….
It looked fine. But if Mr. Lynch was shooting on film he might have shot less and, thus, made a better movie. Who knows?
The problem with Inland Empire isn’t that it makes no sense. Eraserhead and Mullholand Drive don’t make sense either. (Well, they do and they don’t.) The problem, for me, with Inland Empire is that there are MANY passages in the film that are just fucking boring. Just did not connect with me at all. It’s a real shame — there is a great movie here dying to get out.
Just saw it. Pretty much agree that it has moments of brilliance interspersed with many of Lynch’s old tricks which can admittedly grow stale.
But 90 minutes? My only response to that is…where the hell would you begin to cut? And with this type of movie, how would you know how to know when and where to start making cuts? Obviously you can’t cut based on narrative.
I think it’s a take it at is or don’t take it at all propostion. Several walkouts in my audience opted for the “don’t take it at all” approach.
But then again it is L.A. Limited tolerance for ambiguity. Or just…limited…depending on your POV.
My cuts would be just to leave out the boring parts. Anything to do with the “Polish gangsters” or Laura Dern wandering halls looking confused — and trim the monologue-confessions to the dude in the circular glasses.
J Hoberman kinda sums up my ambivalence to Inland Empire thusly:
Wild at Heart
Armed with a digital camera and his own brand of logic, David Lynch forges inward
by J. Hoberman
Inland Empire
Written and directed by David Lynch
December 6-19, IFC Center
No director works closer to his unconscious than David Lynch, and, stimulated by the use of amateur digital-video technology, his latest feature ventures as far inland as this blandly enigmatic filmmaker has ever gone.
A movie about Lynch’s obsessions, Inland Empire is largely a meditation on the power of recording: The first image is a shaft of projected light; the second is a close-up of a phonograph needle dropping on a record’s groove. Familiar tropes include a movie-within-the-movie and the notion of Hollywood as haunted house. But nothing in Lynch’s work is truly familiar, as when a TV sitcom features a cast of humanoid rabbits. For most of Inland Empire, sinister East Europeans are “looking for a way in”—whether to the industry or the narrative or the empire itself. Reality is first breached when a ditzy Polish Gypsy traipses into the vintage, disconcertingly empty Hollywood mansion that belongs to actress Nikki Grace (Laura Dern). Spooking the star with her wolfsbane accent and aggressive prophesies, she casts a spell of weirdness that lasts throughout the movie.
Suddenly it’s tomorrow and Nikki has the role she covets, working with an over-eager director (Jeremy Irons) and acting opposite young rapscallion Devon (Justin Theroux), who’s been touted by a nasty TV gossip (Dern’s mother, Diane Ladd) as the biggest womanizer in Hollywood. An adulterous affair seems over-determined, particularly as that’s the premise of On High in Blue Tomorrows, the unlikely title of the movie that Nikki and Devon are making. Script inevitably merges with life. “Hollywood is full of stories,” someone remarks, referring to the rumor that the Blue Tomorrows screenplay is itself haunted. A previous version was abandoned when “they discovered something inside the story. . . . The two leads were murdered.”
Something or someone is lurking in the recesses of the set—and as Nikki’s c haracter fissures, it turns out to be her. (Dern is in nearly every scene, and pondered by Lynch’s DV camera, her long, angular face is taffy-pulled by wide-angle close-ups into a mask of anguish.) As if in a dream, Nikki is both spectator and protagonist. At one point she is trapped by a mysterious spotlight and spooks herself; at another, she climbs a shabby stairway somewhere in Poland and, suddenly another character altogether, launches into an outrageous, tough-girl confession that might be the world’s most preposterous screen test.
Inland Empire is Nikki’s world, but she doesn’t live in it. She’s variously threatened by characters out of On High in Blue Tomorrows—taunted, for example, by a lascivious girl gaggle who break into a choreographed version of “The Loco-Motion,” thus providing Lynch’s obligatory burst of ’60s pop. Nikki’s mansion devolves into a squalid dump, and a scary Pole known as the Phantom appears next door. Blood mixes with ketchup at a backyard barbecue. Nikki plays her big scene at 4 a.m. on the intersection of Hollywood and Vine, staggering across the star-spangled pavement to collapse amid the homeless.
Inland Empire is Lynch’s most experimental film since Eraserhead. But unlike that brilliant debut (or its two masterful successors, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Dr.), it lacks concentration. It’s a miasma. Cheap DV technology has opened Lynch’s mental floodgates. Inland Empire is suffused with dread of . . . what? Sex, in Lynch, is a priori nightmarish. But there’s a sense here that film itself is evil. Movies are all about editing and acting—which is to say, visual lies and verbal ones—and Inland Empire makes sure you think about both.
Lynch’s notion of pure cinema is a matter of tawdry scenarios and disconcerting tonal shifts. Everything in Inland Empire is uncanny, unmoored, and out of joint. The major special effect is the creepy merging of spaces or times. Do the characters travel through wormholes from Los Angeles to Lodz and the sad, shabby rooms of the On High in Blue Tomorrows set? Are these memories or alternate worlds? Is Lynch looking for some sort of movie beneath the movie? (His long search for closure may be turgid and unrelenting, but it hardly lacks for conviction.) The heroine’s persistent doubling and Lynch’s continuous use of “creative geography” reinforce the sense that he assimilated Maya Deren’s venerable avant-noir Meshes of the Afternoon at an impressionable age. And like Meshes, Inland Empire has no logic apart from its movie-ness.
It’s three hours before Nikki is transfigured (by the “power of love”) and her fearful trip is done. But given its nonexistent narrative rhythms, Inland Empire doesn’t feel that long. (In fact, it doesn’t feel like anything but itself.) It’s an experience. Either you give yourself over to it or you don’t. And if you do, don’t miss the end credits.
It sounds like Hoberman enjoyed the experience of it a little more. Says it doesn’t even “feel that long” (3 hrs.) Which I have to agree with. I may have been lost and confused and wandering through much of it, but I never once checked the cell phone for time. Which says a lot for a 3 hr experimental film.
And as long as you don’t cut the any rabbit scenes, Harry Dean scenes, hot Polish prostitute scenes, and the whole dying on the Walk of Fame sequence, I’m happy.
We’ll have to argue it more in person when I’m up in NYC in a week or so.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s the best movie of the year.
Wow. That’s a bold statement. But I’m less likely to fight you over Inland than Shortbus.
I will say this in praise of Inland – -it is a good movie to remember. As I initially stated, there are some spectacular moments. . .and the “how the hell did we get here” transitions are fun to try and play backwards in your head. But it is not an enjoyable movie to watch – -too damned long and boring. But I do like reading what some critics have to say about it and remembering elements of it.