DIRECTED BY: David Lynch

FEATURING: Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, Justin Theroux

PLOT:  A woman (Harring) is involved in a nighttime accident on Mulholland Drive and flees into the city of Los Angeles with amnesia; she sneaks into an apartment soon to be occupied by naive young Betty (Watts), who has come to Hollywood hoping to find stardom.  Meanwhile, a film director (Theroux) finds himself pressured by mysterious mobsters to cast an unknown actress in his upcoming project.  Betty helps the amnesiac woman try to recover her identity, but the clues only lead to a strange avant-garde nightclub, a key, a box, and a sudden reality shift that throws everything that came before into confusion.

BACKGROUND:

• Lynch originally intended Mulholland Drive as a TV series in the mold of “Twin Peaks.”  When the networks passed on the pilot, the French producer Studio Canal stepped in with additional financing to turn the pilot into a feature film.  In between ABC’s proactive cancellation of the series and the creation of the film version, all of the sets and props were dismantled, forcing Lynch to come up with a different way to complete the story.
• Monty Montgomery, whose appearance as “The Cowboy” is an uncanny show-stopper, is a Hollywood movie producer (who produced Wild at Heart for Lynch).  Mulholland Drive is his only acting credit (he’s listed as “Lafayette Montgomery” in the credits).
• Lynch insisted no chapter stops be included on the DVD.
• The original DVD release included an insert from Lynch containing “10 Keys to Unlocking This Thriller.”
• Mulholland Drive received significant critical acclaim, nabbing Lynch a Best Director award at Cannes (shared with Joel Coen for The Man Who Wasn’t There) and a Best Director Oscar nomination.  It was voted best picture of the Year by the Boston Film Critics Society, the Chicago Film Critics Association, the new York Film Critics Circle, and the Online Film Critics Society (where it tied with Memento in the voting).  It was also voted best foreign picture by the Academy Award equivalents of Brazil, France, Spain, and Australia.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The Silencio nightclub, decorated in Lynch’s trademark red velvet drapes and staffed by his trademark subconscious monsters.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: If the massive reality shifts and actresses unexpectedly playing

Original trailer for Mulholland Drive

multiple roles is not enough for you, then the monster behind the Winkie’s, a Spanish version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” delivered by a woman who collapses onstage, and a mafia-style media syndicate run by a deformed dwarf who uses an eyebrowless cowboy as his right-hand man will convince you that we are deep in that subconscious pit of eroticism, kitsch and weirdness that can only go by the name Lynchland.

COMMENTS:  Oddly enough, what may be the most important scene in Mulholland Drive involves a marginal character, a thick-browed man whose name or profession we never learn.  After this scene we will see him again exactly one time. The man is eating breakfast at a Winkie’s (David Lynch’s mythical version of Denny’s) with a friend.  He’s recounting a dream that he had that occurred in the very diner they’re sitting in.  He goes out of his way to precisely outline the differences between the dream and the way things are now.  In the dream, his breakfast companion was standing in a different place, and he was frightened.  The light was different; it was neither day nor night, but a kind of twilight.  And, most importantly, in the dream there was a man behind the restaurant—”he’s the one that’s doing it”—and the dreamer could see him through the wall.  He’s come to Winkie’s that morning, together with his friend from the dream, to check behind the dumpsters in the light of day and convince himself there’s no one there, to rid himself of that awful fear.

But, this being a David Lynch movie, he doesn’t rid himself of that awful fear.  Quite the contrary.  And because of what happens, we’re left unsure whether this really is his description of the dream, related in the light of day, or is actually the nightmare itself.

Mulholland Drive is a dream of a movie, one with (at least) two sets of realities and characters, inhabited by one set of actors.  Each separate universe is a looking-glass version of the other, reflecting events as if in a funhouse mirror.  $50,000 in cold hard cash is a mystery in one world, and a sin in the other.  And, unlike some of David Lynch’s other movies, there is a solution (of sorts) to the mystery of Mulholland Drive, although it’s a solution that doesn’t betray the film’s mysteriousness.

In terms of penetrability, Mulholland Drive perches somewhere between the eerie off-ness of Blue Velvet and the relative inscrutability of Eraserhead.  This movie is clearly in the tradition of the psychological thriller (a genre that, somewhat surprisingly, Lynch had never tackled before, at least not head on).  And yet, there are plenty of mystical red herrings and pure dream interludes hanging in the heavy Los Angeles air that envelops Mulholland Drive.  Unlike in a typical mystery tale, with Lynch it’s the sumptuous surrealism, not the solution, that puts the thrill in the thriller.  It’s the red lampshade, the phone calls to nowhere, the dwarf in the wheelchair that drive Mulholland.

As always, Lynch releases beautiful, delicate narrative butterflies into the cinemas, but certain fans (you know who you are) insist on trying to catch them, pin them by their wings, and dissect them to death.  This time around, Lynch explicitly (and in my view, perversely) encourages the segment of his audience that prefers to treat his films as puzzles rather than as experiences to analyze the film to death by releasing a flyer called “Ten Clues to Unlocking This Thriller” (thereby negating his own advice, quoted above, to never “demystify” a movie.  No one ever accused David Lynch of a foolish consistency).

Other, more perceptive souls have pleaded with viewers not to try to understand too much of Mulholland Drive. Rather than delighting in Lynch’s clever construction of the puzzlebox, the always perceptive J. Hobermann writes instead that the movie is as “withholding in its narrative as anything in Buñuel” and, after considering that either half of the story might be an illusion, concludes—with a blithe indifference to the carefully constructed plot—”not that it matters.”  In a survey of film critic’s interpretations of the film, nearly everyone resisted the analytical mode.  Roger Ebert insisted, “There is no explanation. There may not even be a mystery”;  Jonathan Ross accepted the standard dream interpretation but demurred that it was “counterproductive to keep analysing it”; Tom Charity offered explanations but worried “I’m not sure if it helps to be so specific;” Neil Roberts was ” wary of over-analysing it,” warning that “[w]e should be careful not to let all this analysis detract from a fantastic film”; and Jane Douglas offered this advice: “in some ways it is better to just watch it without constantly trying to work out what it means.”  After working intimately on the script over a span of two years, Laura Harring concluded, “You want to get it, but I don’t think it’s a movie to be gotten.  It’s achieved its goal if it makes you ask questions.”  And co-star Justin Theroux reminds us “I think [Lynch is] genuinely happy for [Mulholland Drive] to mean anything you want.  He loves it when people come up with really bizarre interpretations.”

For the sake of those who have unwisely followed Lynch’s Ten Clues to their logical conclusion, traversing the entire length of Mulholland Drive, I offer, as a way to recapture the film’s mysterious magic, the following

TEN MYSTERIES THAT RE-LOCK THIS THRILLER

1. Why does David Lynch ask viewers, in his “10 keys to unlocking this thriller” to consider where Aunt Ruth is?  What difference would it make if Aunt Ruth were alive, dead, or never existed?
2. Who is the man who thinks a monster lurks behind Winkie’s?  If he is a dream, then why would Dianne have a dream from the point of view of a total stranger?  Other than its metatextual mood setting role,what reason is there for the man and his nightmare to exist?
3. Why does a second actress (Melissa George) play Camilla Rhodes in the first part of the film?
4. Why is the syndicate so insistent that Adam cast Camilla Rhodes?  The entire conspiracy plotline, which occupies a large part of the first ninety minutes of the movie, gets dropped.
5. Speaking of the syndicate, why don’t they “shut everything down” after Mr. Roque tells them to?  Is “shut everything down” Hollywood gangster talk for “turn up the heat by calling in the Cowboy”?
6. Does Adam ever see the Cowboy again?  (We do, and Diane does, but does he)?  Why draw so much attention to the number of times the Cowboy would appear—other than that, when he says something so strange with such an aura of threat, it’s terribly frightening?  Unless—Diane is really Adam??
7. Why is the director the only main character whose identity doesn’t change (though his circumstances do)?
8. Why do tiny old people come skittering out of a brown paper bag, laughing maniacally?
9. Why does Robert Forster get a special mention in the opening credits, yet appear in the film for less than a minute, doing nothing even mildly important?  Why did he even get a special bio segment on the DVD release?  Is his agent just that good?
10. Seriously, WTF is the deal with Silencio?  Why is there no band?  Why does Betty have a brief epileptic fit while watching the stage show?  And what about the key?  (Why does the hit man think its funny when Diane asks what it opens?)  And the blue box?
11. Are there actually more than ten unanswered questions about Mulholland Drive?

Getting lost in all this talk about the film’s meaning, or lack of same, are the film’s amazing cinematic qualities: the neon-noir cinematography; Angelo Badalamenti’s brooding ambient score, which fits the director’s vision like a well-worn glove and immediately drops the viewer into a Lynchian world; and Naomi Watts’ eye-opening performance, which moves from ingenue to conniving bitch with a seriously invigorating stopover as seductress of both sexes.  There are great individual scenes, including Watts and Harring’s two tender but scorching love scenes, a murder-for-hire that goes comically amiss with a series of human and non-human witnesses that have to be dispatched in turn, and a heartrending, and very weird, Spanish rendition of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” that inexplicably reduces Watts and Harring to tears.   Not only that, but as a bonus you get to see Billy Ray Cyrus cold-cocked onscreen, perhaps the ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasy for millions of Americans who suffered through the darkness of the “Achy Breaky Heart” weeks in 1992.

One of Lynch’s greatest gift is that he skirts the borderline between Surrealism and Symbolism; no one can quite nail him down.  In some movies (this one, for example) lists towards the psychological symbolism end of the spectrum, while in others (INLAND EMPIRE, which is essentially Mulholland Drive on acid) he strives for unadulterated bizarrity.  Most of the time, he mixes comprehensible, relatable psychological symbolism with a deeply irrational and fearful subconscious stream.  He’s pulled off the unique trick of rallying two philosophically opposed film factions: those who treasure the challenge of solving puzzle movies, and those who value the sense of “mysterious fullness” that satisfies precisely because it’s meaning can never be pinned down.  Though claimed by both, he can’t actually belong to both camps.

Can he?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the compelling but intentionally inscrutable return of the ‘weird’ David Lynch that will please his hardcore fans even if it has them scratching their heads as well… for the final 45 minutes, Lynch is in mind-twisting mode that presents a form of alternate reality with no apparent meaning or logical connection to what came before… the sudden switcheroo to head games is disappointing because, up to this point, Lynch had so wonderfully succeeded in creating genuine involvement.”–Todd McCarthy, Variety (contemporaneous)

“The movie is a surrealist dreamscape in the form of a Hollywood film noir, and the less sense it makes, the more we can’t stop watching it… The way you know the movie is over is that it ends. And then you tell a friend, ‘I saw the weirdest movie last night.’ Just like you tell them you had the weirdest dream.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

“The worst movie I’ve seen this year… a load of moronic and incoherent garbage from David Lynch that… predictably ended up at the New York Film Festival, where pretentious poseurs sit with their eyes glued to any screen as long as the projector is still running. From this bizarro atrocity, they should get astigmatism.”–Rex Reed, The New York Observer (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE:  Mulholland Drive – some of the features on this ten year old site are broken (like a link to a chat transcript with Lynch), but Universal deserves credit for continuing to pay fifteen bucks per year to renew the domain name a decade after the film’s release—something studios rarely do

IMDB LINK:  Mulholland Dr. (2001)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Everything You Were Afraid to Ask About ‘Mulholland Drive’ – Bill Wyman, Max Garrone and Andy Klein outline the standard (and almost certainly correct) interpretation of Mulholland Drive.  Obviously, this essay contains major spoilers.

Lost on Mulholland Drive – Film fansite featuring guides, essays, a discussion forum for floating personal theories on the film, and even fan-made music videos

Understanding Mulholland Drive: Nice Film—If You Can Get It – Six film critics (Roger Ebert, Jonathan Ross, Neil Roberts, Tom Charity, Philip French, and Jane Douglas)  give their brief interpretations of Mulholland Drive

All You Have to Do Is Dream – Interpretation of Mulholland Drive by Frederick Lane, a Freudian dream analyst, courtesy of salon.com; a fascinating article, although you’ll learn more about dream states than you will about the film

The Naughts: The Romantic Pair of the ’00s – Charles Taylor of the Independent Film Channel selects Betty and Rita as the emblematic romantic couple of the first decade of the 21st century

Sinnerbrink on Lynch -Cinematic Ideas: David Lynch’s _Mulholland Drive_ – An academic treatment of Mulholland Drive from philosophy professor Robert Sinnerbrink, originally published in “Film-Philosophy,” Vol. 9 No. 34, June 2005; insightful but very technical

The Madman and his Muse – From Film Score Daily comes this interview with composer and frequent Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, focusing on his relationship with the director as well as the score for Mulholland Drive

DVD INFO: As David Lynch eschews both director’s commentaries and chapter stops, the Universal DVD (buy) contains no special features beyond the original theatrical trailer and cast bios (including, of course, one for Robert Forster).  The film is also available for download or rental via video-on-demand services.

(This movie was nominated for review by “MtnGoat,” whgo one year ago complained about a “striking lack of David Lynch” on the site. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Shane Carruth

FEATURING: Shane Carruth, David Sullivan

PLOT: Two engineer/entrepreneurs accidentally discover a box that allows time travel, and

soon get themselves into trouble.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  Primer‘s baffling story gives you an untethered, free-falling in reality feeling.  But although the dense, complicated, and deliberately obtuse plot produces a level of confusion comparable in effect to the weirdest David Lynch movies, I’ve got the sinking feeling that, if you dissect  it carefully, there’s a perfectly logical explanation for everything that happens.  (That complaint makes the 366 project the only outlet in the world to potentially reject Primer because it makes too much sense).

COMMENTS: If what you most value in a movie is a plot that will inspire you to sit down and create a schematic flowchart—maybe using multiple ink colors to illustrate various contingencies—in order to figure out what’s going on, then have I got a recommendation for you!  Made for an incredible $7,000 on suburban locations with only two major characters and no special effects, Primer relies entirely on it’s smart, knotty script to keep the viewer interested—and succeeds admirably.  After a pre-time travel prologue, joltingly edited and spoken largely in an untranslated engineerese that’s fairly bewildering in itself, Aaron and Abe (A & B?) stumble upon a box that will allow them to travel backwards in time for about a day at a time.  Like any of us would, they initially use the box to play the stock market, investing in the day’s biggest mid-cap mover.  After placing their online orders in the morning, they agree to carefully lock themselves in a hotel room away from the rest of the world so that they won’t accidentally kill their own grandfathers or meet their doubles wandering around on the street.  The plan goes well for a while, but then strange, logic-defying events start happening, and each of the two men wonders if the other is cheating on their agreement, secretly going back a day to change events for personal reasons.  Paranoia mounts as they become suspicious of each other and of reality itself.  That brief synopsis actually makes Primer sound more (initially) coherent than it is; the fact is that only a few very subtle clues are strewn about to explain to us what is actually happening at a given moment, the timeline can’t honestly be tracked on a single viewing (because some scenes replay for a second or third time as time-traveling doubles and triples rewrite events), and Carruth frequently deploys vicious jump-cut editing to further disorient us.  It’s extremely confusing, but that’s the point: when Aaron and Abe begin casually screwing with causality, both they, and we, lose track of what’s going on and which timeline we’re actually in.  At one point, a voice on the soundtrack (making a phone call from some future past) reminds us that “the permutations were endless;” if either of the time trippers are tempted to change the future once, they might change it a thousand times, and even if you trust yourself, can you trust your double?  You can approach Primer in one of two ways: you can look at it as a puzzle to be solved, or you can simply enjoy soaking in the free-floating possibilities of the scenario.  I’m in the second camp: to me there are consequences that are unexplored in the narrative that are as interesting, potentially more so, than the ones that are delineated.   But if you find yourself in the first camp, where your fellow campers huddle about the TV screen watching the movie over and over again with a notepad in hand to transcribe the clues, you should realize that any fan “solution” to the movie is going to necessarily involve some conjecture.  In his director’s commentary, Carruth is candid in saying that he did not want the audience to clearly understand everything that happens, because the characters through whose eyes we experience the story don’t understand everything that is happening to them.  With some time alone with a pen and pencil you can reconstruct most of what happens, but, to my mind, you’d be better off focusing on relishing the possibilities and the “feel” of the story.  To Primer‘s detriment, there is no great emotional core to this highly intellectual story, and there are no wondrous images or masterful scenes for the movie to hang its hat on.  However, considering the budget, Carruth (a former engineer who decided he wanted more from a career and taught himself filmmaking from scratch) does an amazing job of making a professional looking-film.  The cinematography, sound and editing seldom become a distraction by betraying their low-budget origins, and the acting is solid and naturalistic; but, Primer earns its recommended rating entirely on the basis of its clever, novel, and ingenious script.

This Jason Gendler article for Nebula magazine contains a convincing elucidation of the plot (it also uses some technical terms from the field of literary analysis that you may have to look up).  If you enjoy this mini-genre of the time-travel puzzle movie, you’ll want to check out Donnie Darko (of course), Triangle, and Timecrimes as well.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… Mullholland Dr. for math geeks…”–Aaron Hillis, Premiere Magazine (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Snowcrash,” who advised, “check it out, it is weird.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Christopher Nolan

FEATURING: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe, Cillian Murphy, Marion Cotillard, Dileep Rao

PLOT: Cobb (DiCaprio), a mercenary with a unique skill—breaking into targets’

subconsciouses as they dream in order to steal business secrets—assembles a team to enter the mind of an heir to a billionaire’s fortune; but will his preoccupation with his lost wife, which is poisoning his own subconscious, destroy the mission?

WILL IT MAKE THE LIST?:  There’s a rule around here: no movie officially makes the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies of all time until it’s released on DVD, so that we can pore over individual scenes at our leisure.  That said, Inception is probably on the borderline.  That’s not to suggest it’s a bad movie; in fact, Inception may well be the best movie released so far in 2010, and has surely already nailed down an Oscar nomination and a spot on most critics 2010 top 10 lists.  The question is, is it weird?  By Hollywood standards, a psychologically thriller about professional dream infiltrators is damn weird; so out there, in fact, that only someone with the clout of a Christopher Nolan could get it made and released as a summer blockbuster.  (Though to be honest, the subject matter is not as weird, to a studio executive, as is the concept of purposefully releasing an movie with a script that’s so complicated and tricky it throws viewers into a state of total bafflement within the first ten minutes).  Nolan’s latest is pop-weird; it creates just a little bit of pleasant confusion that viewers trust will be substantially resolved by the end.  It’s not a movie that will risk leaving us stranded in a psychological limbo.  Nolan’s dreamscapes are surprisingly based in realism, carefully constructed from cinematically familiar parts—mainly old heist movies, film noirs and spy flicks—rather than from abstruse symbols, Jungian archetypes, and monsters from the id.  With its focus on action and self-contained narrative rather than mysticism and mystery, Inception has more in common with crowd-pleasers like The Matrix or Total Recall than it does with 2001: A Space Odyssey or Stalker.  (Although, if we were forced to select the weirdest movie of 2010 in July, we’d be forced to go with this one; thankfully we have five more months of movies to select from).

COMMENTS:  I wondered going into Inception: if I was making a thriller about dreams, one where I knew the viewer would plop down with their tub of popcorn knowing from the outset that I intended to screw with his perception of reality, would I start with a reality-based scene that turns out to be a dream sequence, or try a double pump fake out by starting out with a real sequence and trying to make the audience believe it’s a dream?  As it turns out, in Inception it doesn’t really matter; with its dreams-inside-of-dreams structure,  the story creates a world where there’s little practical distinction between REM sleep and waking life (except that the stakes seem much higher in dreams).  The question in the movie isn’t really “is this a dream?,” but rather “whose dream is this?”  Inception is a surprise movie, where the reviewer feels a duty to provide as few spoilers as possible; although frankly, due to the intricacy of the plot, the film may be effectively spoiler-proof.  DiCaprio plays Cobb, a dream “extraction” specialist who enters others’ minds, manipulates their dreams, and steals their valuable ideas.  A new client wants him to plant an concept in a billionaire’s brain; but implanting an idea (“inception”) is much more difficult than stealing one (“extraction”), because the subject must be fooled into believing he came up with the notion himself.  Cobb, while dodging corporate goons who want him dead for his past thefts, globe-trots around the world gathering a team, consisting, among others, of a chemist to make the sedative drug that makes the dream intrusion possible, a confidence man who can act like people known to the dreamer (a “forger”), and someone who can construct a controlled landscape for the dream to play out in (the “architect”).  For this caper, the architect, a whiz-kid prodigy named Ariadne on her first job (Page), turns out to be the most important secondary character.  She’s the one who takes it on herself to investigate Cobb’s strange behavior, and discovers that his subconscious is so obsessed with the memory of his departed wife Mal (Cotillard) that he keeps causing her to materialize in his target’s dreams, jeopardizing his missions.  What transpired between Cobb and Mal years ago provides the dream agent’s motivation and becomes the movie’s central mystery, creating as much tension as the question of whether the caper will succeed once the subject’s dream starts crumbling.  The dreamscapes the plotters build are carefully controlled, and, despite variable physics, don’t look much like dreams at all; the movie plays with reality and dreams are its substrate, but it’s not at all dreamlike.  The most visionary sequences involve Cobb training the tyro Ariadne in dream navigation techniques.  He takes her to a conjured Paris bistro, then explodes the world around her; she then starts experimenting with altering dream reality and creating impossible geometries, mentally bending a busy city street at a right angle to the ground.  When the team actually begins building the complex phantasmagoria to pull off the scheme, however, it’s surprisingly familiar, with little surreal feel.  In fact, as the plot unfolds, it turns into a multilayered action movie rather than a “dream” movie; the target’s subconscious resists infiltration, and that resistance manifests itself as an army of imaginary soldiers firing upon the intruders.  At one point, Inception becomes a Bond movie, to the third power; simultaneously, we witness a car chase down slick streets in a rainy city, a zero-gravity melee in a hotel, and a shootout on skis on an Arctic tundra, as the scattered team members battle on three different dream layers.  Nolan also lays out elaborate and firm, if somewhat arbitrary, rules about what can happen in a dream mission, which further grounds the picture in reality rather than surreality.  The action scenes cater to the blockbuster spectacle crowd rather than those looking for psychothrills or a mindbending trip, but the movie is assembled and manipulated brilliantly to appeal to almost everyone: it contains visceral thrills, startling CGI sights, an intense speculative premise, emotional depth, suspense, and a mystery to solve.  Inception is, bottom line, enormously entertaining, without sacrificing brains or depth.  Given Hollywood’s low standards, that’s an impressive achievement for a summer blockbuster.

I will add one cryptic “spoiler.”  I kept waiting for a twist at the end of the movie, but it never came.  Or did it?  The final shot is ambiguous, and although there’s no strong reason to doubt the main storyline, minor curiosities throughout the rest of the movie could give the clever viewer the option of constructing their own alternate narrative.  This type of resolution, which suggests a possible further layer to the story without making it explicit, works better in this case than an open-and-shut twist ending that would seal the correct interpretation away in a vault forever.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This extraordinary movie, a profoundly strange – and strangely profound – spelunking trip through the cavernous human psyche, stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Cobb, a corporate thief who specializes in “extracting” secrets from the minds of dreaming victims… If that sounds weird, just you wait; it gets weirder.”–Amy Biancolli, San Francisco Chronicle (contemporaneous)

FEATURING: Christian Bale, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, John Sharian

PLOT: A troubled man tries to solve the riddle of his fragmented existence as he becomes

increasingly tormented by strange visions and apparitions.

WHY IT ‘S ON THE BORDERLINE: The events which unfold in The Machinist are hard to wrap one’s mind around.  It is difficult to ascertain what is real and what is unreal.  Other, more cleverly thought-out films, have handled this same premise with more finesse, however.

COMMENTS:  Honestly? I liked this movie much better THE FIRST NINE TIMES I SAW IT! When it was called:

Dead and Buried (1981), and
Final Approach (1991), and
The Sixth Sense (1991), and
Crazy As Hell (2002), and
The Return (2003), and
Stay (2005), and
Dark Corners (2006), and
Salvage (2006), and
Cold Storage (2006).

The Machinist is a well made Spanish puzzler that waxes somewhat melodramatic.  However, the triggering event for its basic premise, while not overly preachy, is well, kinda damn preachy.  Additionally, somebody should have told the filmmakers that this plot has been produced before (OK, nearly every plot has been previously used one way or another. To wit: Brett Sullivan’s The Chair is basically The Skeleton Key or Child’s Play repackaged, but the premise of The Machinist has been done a LOT.  As such, redoing it yet again demands a very fresh take, and an unconventional handling of the idea).

In The Machinist Christian Bale plays, you guessed it, an industrial machinist who lives and works in a creepy industrial park (the movie was filmed in Barcelona, so you bet they found an imposing-looking one, although a similar location in Bilbao might have been even more grim.)  Bale’s character Trevor is a gangly nervous wreck.  It seems to be a glandular problem.  The poor guy’s heart beats like a rabbit’s.  He has the metabolism of a hummingbird, and he’s losing weight.  A LOT of weight.  In fact Trevor is starting to look like Lara Flynn Boyle, which is to say that his weight loss is going terminal.

But Trevor’s sleep difficulties present an even more serious problem.  Trevor hasn’t slept in a year.  Not a wink.  And now Trevor is seeing spooky things and people who may or may not really be there.  It causes him to have an embarrassing little accident at work.

At this point everything in Trevor’s life starts to deteriorate all the more quickly in a confusing and increasingly sinister jumble.  It’s almost as if the powers of Providence are trying to tell him something.  Something TERRIBLE!

For at least the tenth reworking of the premise, The Machinist wasn’t bad.  Except for the fact that after the first twenty minutes I saw where they were going with the idea and it became tedious and predicable (for me).  Frankly, the most interesting aspect of the film was the imposing, Frank Booth-like character Ivan (Sharian).  It is worthwhile to view The Machinist just to catch Sharian’s portrayal of Trevor’s phantom-like nemesis.

If however, you are unfamiliar with any of the other films listed above, don’t let me discourage you from seeing The Machinist. Or do.  Actually I would strongly recommend Dark Corners, Stay or Final Approach.  Those three films offer a much more sophisticated treatment of the same premise. Unless, of course, you  happen to have the hots for Christian Bale.  Which brings me to my next observation.

Bale’s modification of his morphology  in the movie is an example of what I like to think of as a gimmick.  It is a trick by which we confuse a physical transformation with true dramatic talent.  An example might be a pretty, alluring actress playing the part of a hardened, lesbian killer as with Charlize Theron in Monster.

Of course actresses can get away with turning blech! but we expect the actors to undergo physical transformations. Mel Gibson found that out when he made The Man Without a Face, a film that forced viewers to imagine a reality in which women DON’T want to jump Mel Gibson’s bones. Despite turning in a strong performance that Roger Ebert was obviously queer for, the only recognition the film got was a couple of polite nods from The Young Artist Awards, and those went to the film’s child actors. Ha! Oh well. The critics are fickle

While Matt Damon gained 30 pounds for his role in he Informant (and still looked handsome), Christian Bale lost a dangerous amount of weight for his emaciated persona in The Machinist, and he looks . . . just awful.  Given the acclaim he garnered for that feat of dedicated thespianism, shouldn’t somebody at least produce a film adaptation of the old TV series, ”Gentle Ben” for the sake of casting Kirstie Alley?  She needs the career help and she looks the part.  Think about it, Hollywood.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

The Machinist trailer

DIRECTED BY: Christopher Nolan

FEATURING: Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano

PLOT:  A man suffering from an inability to form short term memories hunts for his

wife’s murderer, relying on notes he leaves himself and important facts he tattoos on his body.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It isn’t weird.  Other than the unconventional narrative structure, Memento could even be viewed as a bit of hardcore realism.   But it is easy to see why lovers of the weird are attracted to it; the cloudy mystery that attaches to the story and its central cipher doesn’t lift until the very end, creating a disorientation that feels subjectively weird even though the story is actually firmly grounded in reality.

COMMENTS: Here, I’ll make it easy for you with this paragraph.  To appreciate just how intricately Memento is constructed, and how big of an accomplishment the movie is, try reading the sentences in a story or essay backwards, from the last to the first, and see how much sense they make and how satisfying the experience is.  This time, it’s executed flawlessly.  The movie is epistemologically pessimistic, but artistically invigorating; it’s one of those rare, unique plot hooks that come around once or twice a decade, and you can only hope the filmmakers don’t compromise and do invest the extra work required to pull it off.  It’s a simple concept but far more than a gimmick; the inversion of cause and effect works wonders.  Nothing distracts our attention from trying to unravel the puzzle.  The direction and the performances by the three principals are professionally transparent; the script is the star, as it should be in a mystery.  Leonard insists that memory is faulty, eye witness testimony is unreliable, and that the only thing he can depend on is facts—the notes he inks indelibly on his own body—but as the story works its way from the conclusion to the origin, we start to suspect that there may be nothing that we can accept at face value.  It quickly becomes apparent that it would be easy to manipulate someone with Leonard’s condition, and we have as much reason as he does to be suspicious of his two principal hangers-on: the unctuous Joe Pantoliano, who looks and acts like a small-time con-man, and beaten down (and beaten up) bartender Carrie-Anne Moss, whose seductive smile and distant eyes scream “femme fatale.”  To keep us as in the dark as Leonard is, Christopher Nolan tells his story in a series of flashbacks that continually move backwards in time; when the next scene begins, we’re thrown into the middle of the action with as little context as Leonard has.  But where did he get that nifty sports jacket, and his expensive sports car, and that scar on his face?  To figure out what’s going on, he relies on notes that he scrawls and checks wherever he can; whenever he meets someone new, he reaches into the pocket of his natty white coat and hopes to find a Polaroid with the stranger’s name and some pertinent information printed on it.  The one constant that sticks in his mind is that he’s hunting his wife’s killer; he’s tattooed the suspect’s name, along with numerous clues, onto his torso.  This is because he’s lost the ability to form short-term memories: after ten minutes or so, he forgets everything except for the facts he knew before a sap to the head sent him bonkers, and must reorient himself to the present.  When Leonard finds himself running through the rows of a trailer park parallel to another runner, he must calmly decide whether he’s doing the chasing, or whether he himself is being hunted down.  Guy Pearce’s Leonard Shelby has to overcome a handicap that would cause a lesser revenge killer throw up his hands in despair and take up an easier movie vocation, like becoming a ruthless rich bastard and trying to steal the heart of a woman away from a guileless nice guy by bolstering her misconceptions about his innocent kiss with a romantic rival.

Memento‘s uniqueness confounds the tagging system.  It’s not a typical amnesia movie—Leonard only forgets recent events, but he remembers his identity and purpose—but it shares enough similarities with amnesia movies to be listed alongside them.  Also,  it’s technically not a particularly nonlinear movie; only one important scene (shot black and white) occurs out of sequence.  Yet, anyone who’s looking for a nontraditional narrative structure would do themselves a disservice by skipping the brilliant Memento, which mucks up time but plays fair with the viewer according to its own set of rules.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…like an existential crossword puzzle, or a pungent 50′s B-thriller with a script by Jorge Luis Borges… a brilliant feat of rug-pulling, sure to delight fans of movies like ‘The Usual Suspects’ and ‘Pi.’”–A.O. Scott, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

[(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Vooshvazool.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)]

DIRECTED BY: Christopher Smith

FEATURING: Melissa George

PLOT: The mother of an autistic son reluctantly goes on a pleasure cruise with five other

young adults; the yacht capsizes in a freak electrical storm and the party is “rescued” by an abandoned ocean liner.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Triangle is weird, and frankly entertaining, but like Stay, it kept reminding me of other, slightly better, movies I’d seen before.

COMMENTS:  Triangle depends so much on its plot twist—which you will be highly unlikely to see coming until about the midpoint of the movie—that it’s difficult to talk about the film without spoiling it, though I’ll do my best.  Melissa George does a creditable job and was a good casting choice for the lead: she’s easy on the eyes, tough yet vulnerable, anguished in her misplaced guilt over “abandoning” her autistic son to go on the ill-fated pleasure cruise, and generally likable, all of which makes the film’s ultimate revelation about her easier to take.  The rest of the cast does a decent job in supporting roles, but it’s entirely George’s picture.  The direction is good: dramatic, suspense and action scenes are handled well, although there’s no single scene that sticks out quite far enough for the movie to hang a hat on.  The abandoned steamer—it’s never clear whether it’s a commercial ship or a luxury liner, although it does have a theater and a banquet room—makes for an atmospheric location on a mid-sized budget.  As noted, the mystery of the opening builds until about the midpoint, where things begin to get clear; then, it’s mostly a question of details, of following the premise where it will inevitably lead.  Unfortunately, where it leads is to a coda that creates more questions than it resolves.  It’s safe to say that the movie is more satisfying on an emotional level, as a metaphor for the difficulty of escaping a pattern of self-destructive behavior, than it is on a plot level.  Eventually, the script becomes too clever for its own good, gliding casually past the difficult paradoxes it creates, hoping the audience either won’t notice or won’t care.  That’s not always a problem in a movie, and along with the fact that the movie never tries to explain where it’s supernatural rules originate, it certainly adds to the weird factor.  But Triangle gives off the vibe that it wants to provide a satisfying and complete resolution, something that closes the loop, but can’t quite manage it.  When you get to the end, you may wind up asking yourself, where does this story actually begin?  With it’s cyclical structure that appears to wrap the plot up in a self-contained ball but actually falls apart on closer inspection, Triangle reminded me of a poor man’s Donnie Darko.  Compared to that adolescent angst flick, it’s more coherent but less original, less aggressive in its outrageous plot devices, less emotionally affecting, and lacking in star turns and impeccably orchestrated individual scenes.

Triangle is worthy of a recommendation.  But the film compares unfavorably not only to Donnie Darko, but also to the little seen Timecrimes [Los Cronocrímenes] (2007).   (To make things as twisted as one of these psychothriller plots, the original Timecrimes is being remade in English and is scheduled for a 2011 release, meaning soon enough we will see people complaining that Timecrimes is nothing but a Triangle rip-off).  It shares its central plot idea with the low-budget Spanish picture, and maybe even a little more than that:

Although Los Cronocrímenes and Triangle share the same basic idea, there is no plagiarism going on here.  In the Spanish movie, the mysterious masked killer in a black trench coat uses scissors in the Spanish countryside; in Triangle, it’s a rifle on the high seas.  On a more serious note, the two movies take very different approaches to explore the consequences of the speculative conceit at the center of their stories, and there are serious discrepancies in their tones and aesthetic strategies.  Timecrimes is a hard science fiction story built entirely around plot machinations; Triangle is a moody psychological thriller that’s interested in weirding the viewer out and creating an emotional context missing in the Spanish feature.  When I first saw Timecrimes, I thought that it was a brilliant script, but that it could have done better with a glossier production and a bigger budget.  The story was fascinating but there was little that seemed truly cinematic about the picture; the locations were minimal, the characters mere pawns, and the script offered opportunities for nerve-wracking suspense that the novice director wasn’t capable of capitalizing on.  After watching Triangle tackle the same idea with a higher budget, more expansive locations, and a seasoned crew, I found the main effect was to make me appreciate the discipline and simplicity of the earlier script much more.  With no attempt to set a deeper mood or supply emotional relevance, Timecrimes worked like a wind-up toy: you sat back and admired the intricate choreography as the fated events unfolded before your eyes.  It took it’s speculative premise and ran with it, adopting a hardcore “what-if” realism.  There was an exhilaration in the exhibition of the scripter laying it all out before the viewer, essentially telling you exactly what he was about to do and then still amazing you when he actually did it.  Triangle, which tries to hide what’s going on for as long as it can so we can bask in the mystery, seems muddled by comparison.  Although it may sound like apostasy coming from me, I guess weirder is not always better.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…as things shift from tempestuous travelogue to maritime slasher to claustrophobic psychodrama, the film limns a brain-bending enigma, trapping us all at once in an unraveling mind, in a never-ending twilight zone – and in the prison house of cinema itself. The circle of this infuriatingly nightmarish narrative seems impossible to square, making it like Alain Resnais’ masterpiece Last Year In Marienbad (1961), only set (mostly) on a boat, in colour, and with a lot of blood… one of the best (and most bewildering) genre films of 2009.”–Channel 4 Film

“For sure, one of the weirdest films you’ll ever see, a cult film above and beyond anything else; a film for those initiated into midnight screenings.  Where else do such dreams take place?”—Ernest Mathjis, DVD liner notes for the Barrel Entertainment edition of Malpertuis

DIRECTED BY: Harry Kümel

FEATURING: Mathieu Carrière, Susan Hampshire, Orson Welles, Michel Bouquet, Jean-Pierre Cassel

PLOT:   When his ship sets anchor in a Flemish town, Jan, a sailor, goes looking for his childhood home, only to find that it burned down years ago.  Seeing a fleeing woman he believes to be his sister, he chases her into a brothel where he is knocked unconscious in a brawl.  He awakens in Malpertuis, a massive estate ruled by his Uncle Cassavius (Orson Welles) from his sickbed.  Cassavius reads his will to his very strange extended family, and its provisions set them at deadly odds with one another.

BACKGROUND:

• Malpertuis was an adpation of the only novel written by the Belgian fantasist Jean Ray, who was famous for his macabre short stories (and is sometimes compared to Edgar Allen Poe or H.P. Lovecraft). The novel was complex, composed of four separate narratives told by four characters, and therefore presented a challenge to adapt.
• Kümel’s previous film was the dreamlike, erotic vampire tale Daughters of Darkness [Les lèvres rouges] (1971).  Hired to make a sexy commercial horror movie, Kümel delivered a memorably bizarre film that pleased exploitation audiences looking for blood and breasts, but was also a crossover hit in the arthouse circuit.  The success of Daughters convinced United Artists to back the Malpertuis project, which was the film Kümel personally wanted to make.  UA’s financial backing enabled Kümel to hire Orson Welles for the key role of Cassavius.
• Orson Welles was hired for three days of shooting.  An irascible, elderly eccentric by this time in his career, Welles asked for his fee to be delivered in cash in a suitcase.  Welles was drunk and rude on the set, interfering with Kümel’s attempts to direct and, in one case, repeatedly ruining one of Michel Bouquet’s takes until the director agreed to give Welles a closeup he had requested.  At the end of Welles’ three-day contract, the project was well behind schedule due to the legendary actor’s drunkenness, extended lunch breaks and general peevishness.  Apologizing for his behavior, Welles volunteered to work for a fourth day free, and performed all his remaining scenes perfectly in a single morning, putting the production back on schedule.
• Malpertuis was selected to compete for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1972, but United Artists did not like Kümel’s two-hour cut and submitted a dubbed, re-edited 100 minute  version of the film rather than the director’s preferred version.  The film was not popular with the jury, then bombed in both the United States and Europe when UA released its preferred version (misleadingly marketed as a horror pic) as The Legend of Doom House. Not only did the film tank, but Kümel’s promising young career was cut short.  Disgusted with studio interference, he began directing in television and teaching, and has directed only a few unremarkable feature films (including some arty softcore pornography) in the last twenty-eight years.
• The director’s cut of the film was unavailable on video for many years, and was not seen until the film was re-released in 2002.  This cut was not available on home video until 2005, and not available on Region 1 until 2007.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  The weary face of the legendary Orson Welles, grumpy and gray but still regal, as he reclines in tuxedo-like pajamas against scarlet bedsheets.  The bed-ridden Welles embodies the decaying secret center of the wickedness of Malpertuis.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Even before we get to the psychedelic-era Chinese puzzle-box of

Original French trailer for Malpertuis

an ending(s), Malpertuis has created a disorienting sense of oddness.  Both the film and the titular estate are labyrinthine mazes filled with enchanting and mysteriously decorated rooms, with little explanation of how these dazzling individual pieces fit together into the grand layout.

COMMENTS: “It’s pretty, but it’s a bit difficult to understand… Somehow, it makes me think of all kinds of things, but I’m not sure exactly what.”  Harry Kümel selects this epigraph, spoken by Alice in “Through the Looking Glass,” to begin the director’s cut of Malpertuis.  In the edited version of the film which premiered at Cannes,  the producers kicked off the movie with a different quote, this time from Shakespeare: “…a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”  The two quotes are descriptions of possible responses to a mysterious nonsense tale, but the first implies a weird delight in ambiguity, while the second legend sounds like a jab at Kümel.

Both quotes are reasonable responses to Malpertuis.  The film is undeniably pretty, often irresistibly so, thanks to the dramatic camerawork of cinematographer Gerry Fisher and the brilliant set designs of Pierre Cadiou de Conde.  Malpertuis is undoubtedly full of sound and fury, from Orson Welles commandingly hammy performance to a liver being torn out onscreen to the multiple false endings, and although it could hardly be said to signify nothing, one could fairly conclude that the resolution didn’t justify the bombast.  As far as whether this tale is told to us by an idiot… well, seeing the unmarketable film Kümel delivered after United Artists threw millions of dollars at him in hopes of generating a big hit, the producers might have concluded so.  More charitably, this tale seems to be told by a wunderkind director who is so enamored with his own genius and trickery that he forgets to make his story accessible to his audience.

The massive estate of Malpertuis, which is so detailed that it almost becomes a separate character, is a mazelike manse full of long, narrow halls lit by flickering gas torches that lead to various drawing rooms, attics, laboratories, spiral staircases, kitchens, gardens, and cathedrals, each with their own unique color scheme and props, each lovingly detailed.  As Jan wanders these disorienting corridors, we get no idea of the layout or grand plan of the multi-building estate of Malpertuis; we never know what may be around the next corner.  Malpertuis, the movie, is a lot like Malpertuis, the manor, in that sense.  Individual scenes are impeccably constructed, but other than providing a common atmosphere, they don’t seem to fit into a grand plan.  Individual scenes stick in the minds eye: Sylvie Varlan’s sexy burlesque in a pop-cartoonish red bordello, Uncle Cassavius insulting each of the vultures gathered around his deathbed in turn as a prelude to divulging the conditions of his last will and testament, a sequence where Jan encounters three streetwalkers of varying degrees of experience, each wearing a mask that contradicts her real age.  Each of these pieces is intriguing on its own, but they add up to less than they should.

The players are as baroque and detailed as the rooms of the mansion and the set-pieces.  Characters are the key to Malpertuis; each member of this extended family of weirdos has an alter-ego, and if you catch one of them, you might guess the secret of Malpertuis before the director intends.  There is the protagonist, blond Jan, a sailor who cannot remember his past, or even remember that he has forgotten it.  Jan is assayed by Mathieu Carrière in an adequate performance; an androgynous Adonis, he was chosen for the role mainly for his startlingly pretty looks.  Orson Welles tackles the role of Cassavius, as domineering and crusty a patriarch as any family of depraved misfits might deserve.  Michel Bouquet, who in his bowler looks more than a little like John Steed gone to seed, makes quite an impact as the sometimes comic, sometimes vicious Uncle Dideroo, who always finds time to go out of his way to push a crippled boy to the ground as he rushes past on an errand.  Philaris, Cassavius’ half-mad, half-idiot, gnomelike taxidermist assistant, and Lampernist, a disturbed cousin who talks to rats (they talk back) and constantly frets that Cassivius is about to turn out the lights, round out the main members of the huge male cast.  Then there are the women: Nancy, Jan’s sensual sibling who is physically affectionate towards him in a very non-sisterly way, but is also deeply in love with another relative; Euryale, with her fiery red curls and perpetually downcast eyes; and the three black-clad spinster sisters, most prominent among them the young and pretty Alice, who sleeps with Dideroo but yearns for Jan.  (Adding another touch of strangeness, Nancy, Euryale, and Alice, as well as another minor role, are all played by Susan Hampshire.  To Hampshire’s credit, and the credit of the makeup department, you might not notice this fact without being told).

With these bizarre characters, trapped together inside this rambling Gothic edifice, Kümel has the right ingredients for a fascinating scenario.  It takes about an hour to complete the setup, but we are forgiving; the atmosphere is lovely to soak in.  Once the characters have been introduced and locked away together inside the mansion, there are two ways the plot can go: Jan can explore Malpertuis and discover the secret to all the strange happenings, or we can watch the already unhinged characters go stark raving mad, eating away at each other.  It is at this point that the promising scenario begins falls apart.  Kümel pursues both plot paths, but follows neither to the end.  Jan keeps discovering clues, but in the end, it turns out the clues he finds don’t matter.  Philaris sends him on a wild goose chase to set a mousetrap in the attic;  he puzzles over a key to a secret room that never materializes;  Alice promises to give him a clue, but when he meets her all he gets is a torrid romp with Susan Hampshire’s body double.  If the script hadn’t set up the premise that these hints would lead Jan to deduce Malpertuis’ mystery, we wouldn’t feel so cheated by the constant digressions and failures to follow up loose ends.  On the other plot front, we suspect that the characters might go stir-crazy and start bumping each other off; late in the game, this does indeed come to pass, but not in the way we expect, or for good reason.

This part of the film, from the midpoint to just before the climax, promises to build to something, but the script keeps getting distracted by some idea for a pretty scene, and rushes off to explore another baroque notion.  It’s as if the movie, having taken its time in the setup, now feels that it has to rush to its conclusion, and sets off in all directions at once.  Subplots are cut short; we never learn what those talking mice were all about.  The two situations Kümel was working in suddenly resolve themselves by fiat; without Jan figuring out anything on his own, a character simply explains the premise in a few lines of dialogue.  It’s a reveal that doesn’t satisfy us because it’s not earned; it also leaves a lot of interesting questions about Cassavius’ motives, identity and techniques (which certainly would have been addressed in the novel) unasked, much less answered.  To resolve the plotline exploring the conflict among the heirs, Kümel simply has all of them snap at once.

It gets worse from here, however, as Kümel launches us into an anarchic finale that nests dreams inside of dreams.  A single reality shift in a film can be exhilarating, if well done; Malpertuis‘ twist is not particularly satisfying, but Kümel tries to compensate by throwing another one at us (and then another one).  It doesn’t feel like we’re being exposed to a great mystery inside a mystery; it feels like we’re being yanked around by a director for his own amusement.  It’s maddening for the audience, who have been led to believe they’re watching one kind of story, only to find they’ve been watching no kind of story at all.  Kümel has simply been building atmosphere all along; but the atmosphere envelops not a world, but only another atmosphere.

The United Artists cut of the film that Kümel despised dispenses with one entire dream sequence, which is an advantage in itself  (although the cut leads to continuity problems with a sudden change of wardrobe and an unexplained head wound).  The rest of the edit has advantages and disadvantages over the director’s cut, so that comparing the two cuts is nearly a wash.  On the plus side for the UA version, you get to hear Orson Welles speaking in his own voice, rather than dubbed into Flemish; on the negative side, the rest of the English-dubbed performances leave something to be desired.  Whereas Kümel’s cut was possibly a bit too leisurely in the setup, the UA edit is too rushed, and leaves out some non-essential minor scenes which nevertheless add much to the initial atmosphere of foreboding.  The two versions use Georges Delerue’s terrific original score differently, as well.  I prefer Kümel’s more subtle orchestration, where tense scenes are accompanied only by a timpani; in the UA cut, the orchestration is far lusher, bordering on the ridiculously over-romantic at times.  All in all, the two versions each have their strengths and weaknesses; Kümel’s cut is to be preferred, but it’s not the great leap forward fans of the “butchered” original may have hoped to see, and the longer cut is actually more confusing at the climax.

If you set foot on the grounds of Malpertuis, expect to see wonders.  Wander around at your leisure, soaking in the sights.  But if, while you’re touring the estate, a script comes up to you hinting it holds a map that will help you get your bearings among the twisted corridors, just smile and continue on your way.  You’ll only feel cheated if you buy into the plot, and someone will come by to explain everything and whisk you away to the exit soon enough.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Bizarre, lurid and baffling… Kümel’s picture is quite unfathomable and never justifies the effort employed to try and figure it out. For Welles completists only.”—Neil Smith, BBC (re-release)

“…more intriguing than affecting… But it’s a gorgeous film and a mysterious curiosity.”—Sean Axmaker, MSN Movies (DVD)

“…an exquisitely bonkers folly of the highest order – seemingly intended to be a kind of Bunuelian version of Gormenghast, but too often ending up more like a over-egged cod-surrealist panto.”—Neil Young, Neil Young’s Film Lounge (festival viewing)

IMDB LINK: Malpertuis (1971)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

The Weird Review: Malpertuis: The Novel & Film; or, We’ll Always Have Olympus:  In this comparison of the novel and film, Adam Walter, who admires the book, finds the movie to be a worthy adaptation up until the muddled conclusion.

DVD INFO:  The 2007 2 disc Barrel Entertainment release (buy) is the best version the movie’s fans could hope for; if anything, it’s overly reverent.  It contains both the 119 minute directors cut and the 100 minute “Cannes version.”  Commentary by Kümel and the first assistant director, a 90 minute interview with the director (discussing his entire career, but focusing almost exclusively on Daughters of Darkness and Malpertuis), and featurettes on Orson Welles, Susan Hampshire, and Jean Ray comprise the extras.  The package also comes with a booklet with two scholarly essays on the movie.  (In an example of just how confusing the movie can get, professor and Kümel scholar Ernest Mathijs makes an error when synopsizing the plot in his essay, implying that Jan was lured into the bordello by Alice, when in fact it was Nancy he was chasing).

FEATURING: Kôji Yakusho, Masato Hagiwara

PLOT:  A detective with a mentally ill wife seeks to solve a series of murders committed

by ordinary people, each of whom has come into contact with a strange, amnesiac man.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: There’s no doubt Cure is a weird one, what with its unexplained creatures tied to shower rods, its ambiguous antagonist, and its head-scratching ending.  It’s also a good psychological thriller, but it doesn’t quite throw the knockout punch needed to give it an undisputed place on the 366 weirdest movies of all time (although I admit the general critical consensus disagrees with that position).  Cure does seem like a movie that could well age into an outstanding vintage if it’s left to ferment in the cellar of the viewer’s subconscious for a time, which is why I suspect I’ll be returning to sample it again someday.

COMMENTS:  Cure is a movie that seeks to sink into the lowest, darkest depths of the human subconscious and wallow there.  It’s no doubt an intriguing, and a weird, movie, but I found it somewhat unsatisfying by the end: it pulls itself apart by moving in too many different directions.  The premise is that ordinary people commit atrocious murders, using the same modus operandi, an “X” cut into their victim’s chest.  Their reactions after they’re apprehended vary from maniacal bereavement to calm detachment, but the perpetrators uniformly report that their horrific actions seemed normal at the time.  The tie that binds these unwitting criminals together is that they’ve all encountered Mr. Mamiya, an amnesiac young man who has a short-term memory span somewhere between thirty seconds and one minute, and who answers almost every question put to him with the same response: “Who are you?”

On one obvious thematic level, the film deals with the question of identity, although it does so superficially (i.e., “who is” Takabe, really: the single-minded professional, or the devoted husband selflessly caring for his mentally ill wife?)  Much more interesting than those speculations is the mysterious dynamic between Mr. Mamiya and those he encounters.  With no memory or personal history, Mamiya is a blank slate, but he manages to reflect the darker impulses of whatever unfortunate he talks to.  Strangely, Detective Takabe seems to be the only one who’s able to resist Myami’s baleful influence: but of course we ask ourselves–can he really?  Takabe’s explosive confrontation with a chillingly calm Myami in a strangely lit hospital cell is the dramatic, and the dreamlike, highlight of the film.  Myami’s character is more interesting in the early reels, when he seems an innocent bringing destruction instinctively, without intent or reflection; as his character grows more obliquely sinister, he loses some of his power.

A late-blooming subplot/possible red herring involving a Japanese cult of mesmerists offers a possible solution to the mystery for the literal minded, but distracts from the more interesting psychological angle.  After building a pleasantly sickening tension, I found that Cure let me down in the curiously rushed climax that ends with a notoriously ambiguous final scene.  I don’t mind the ambiguity in the ending per se:  it works on Kurosawa’s intended thematic level.  I wasn’t grabbed by the director’s invitation to muse about what “really” happened on the plot level, though there’s ample room for argument on that score for interested parties.  But I felt let down, even cheated, on a dramatic level, because the movie suddenly snaps to the credits unexpectedly, without a chance for any real emotional closure or reflection.

It’s worth mentioning that this movie was released only two years after the sarin gas attacks on Tokyo subways.  The idea of seemingly ordinary people manipulated by a mystical, cultlike figure into committing horrific crimes would have had a much greater resonance with a Japanese audience viewing the picture in 1997 than it would to a DVD audience lacking that immediate subtext.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Cure delves ever further into abstraction as it goes along, casting its own hypnotic spell and inviting as many interpretations as a Rorschach inkblot. Kurosawa approaches the story—and, in effect, his country’s existential crisis—as a mystery to be pursued but not resolved, at least in any conventional sense. It may take several viewings to come to terms with Cure‘s loose ends and psychological intrigue, but the film is seductive enough to warrant them.”–Scott Tobias, The Onion A.V. Club (DVD)

This film was nominated for review by reader “Richard L.“. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.

Donnie: “Sorry.”

Gretchen: “No, it was a compliment.”

(Theatrical Cut)

-or-
(Director’s Cut)

DIRECTED BY: Richard Kelly

FEATURING: Jake Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone, Mary McDonnel, Patrick Swayze, Drew Barrymore, Kathryn Ross

PLOT:  Troubled teen Donnie sees visions of a six foot tall demonic bunny rabbit named Frank, who demands that he commit acts of vandalism in a sleepy suburban town in 1988.  Donnie narrowly escapes a freak accident when a jet engine crashes into his bedroom after Frank has awoken him and called him away.  Frank tells Donnie that the world will end in 28 days, on Halloween night, and Donnie attempts to figure out what he can do to save the world while simultaneously dealing with a new girlfriend, bullies, a motivational speaker he sees as a cult leader, and ever-escalating hallucinations.

BACKGROUND:

• This was the first feature film for writer/director Richard Kelly.
• With Barrymore, Swayze and Ross attached, there was a tremendous buzz for the film going into the Sundance Festival.  The movie was not a hit at there, however, and was only picked up for limited theatrical distribution by Newmarket Films at the last moment.
• Although Donnie Darko was initially a flop on its domestic release, a strong showing overseas helped it to nearly break even.  The film then became a cult hit on video, earning back more than double its production cost.
• The director’s cut, containing about 20 minutes of extra footage and including pages from the fictional book “The Philosophy of Time Travel,”  was released in 2004.  It was controversial due to the added footage, which  caused some fans to complain that Kelly didn’t seem to understand his own movie.
• Kelly created a website (now hosted at donniedarkofilm.com), which is structured like a puzzle.  Navigating the website can reveal supplemental material and backstory to the film.
• Donnie Darko is one of the most talked about films on the Internet, with several competing fan sites and FAQ’s that attempt to clarify and explain the convoluted plot.
• Followed by a poorly received direct-to-video sequel about Donnie’s sister called S. Darko (2009), which angered many fans.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  Frank, the six-foot tall man dressed in a twisted, metallic bunny suit, who only Donnie can see.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Donnie Darko at first appears to be a dizzying

Original trailer for Donnie Darko

collision of genres, themes and ideas.  For the first few reels of the film, the audience can have no conception where the film is heading.  The director drops clues through these opening segments that appear at the time to be simply bizarre, but spark numerous “a-ha!” moments later, when incidents that seemed like throwaway moments or coincidences at the first glance turn out to make a sort of sense.  The “identity” of Frank, the demonic bunny, is the most thrillingly chilling such moment.  Donnie Darko creates a sense of wonder and mystery throughout its running time, and sparks hope and faith in the watcher that all will be made clear before the curtain drops.   It nests this expectancy inside a bed of genuine empathy for tormented Donnie and his colorful cast of supporting characters.  But perhaps the weirdest thing about Donnie Darko is that it asks us to take its plot at face value; it works very hard to try to convince us that what appear on the surface to be the hallucinations of a paranoid schizophrenic teenager are, in fact, real occurrences with a metaphysical explanation.

COMMENTS: Even putting the mindbending plot aside for a moment (we’ll come back to that subject), Donnie Darko would be weird just because of the incredible shifts in style.  At times, writer/director Richard Kelly seems to be channeling: John Hughes.  The Last Temptation of Christ.  The Catcher in the Rye.  One of Quentin Tarantino’s absurdist pop-culture rants.  An episode of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone.  David Lynch.  At times, the movie seems to be: a black comedy.  A high concept science fiction picture.  A character study.  A parody of 80s teen comedies.  An avant-garde surrealist film.

But the various ingredients never seem jarring.  They blend into a coherent whole, like the ingredients in a stew.  Kelly wears his influences on his sleeve, but he creates an entirely new and unique universe out of these elements: the universe of Donnie Darko, easily one of the most original films of the young millennium.

The production seems to have been as blessed as the initial marketing of the film was cursed.  Kelly seems nothing at all like a first-time feature director.  His visual choices are mature and confident.  The film is bookended by two magnificent 80s era musical montages.  The first, set to “Head Over Heels”, is a technically magnificent one-take tracking shot that snakes throughout Donnie’s school, introducing several minor characters.  The second, set to “Mad World”, is a heart-wrenching epilogue, following each character in the aftermath of the climax, rising from minor to major characters until stopping just before an emotionally devastating (and mysterious) shared moment between the two most important people in Donnie’s life.

Kelly also manages a cumbersome cast of varying experience levels masterfully.  Credit for the memorable characterizations ultimately stems from the script.  With so many characters playing a part in the story—the entire community of fictional Middlesex, Virginia is affected in some way by Donnie’s every act—it would be impossible not to construct some of the characters out of psychological cardboard.  Donnie Darko‘s villains are caricatures and pure objects of satire, but they play their role perfectly and don’t detract from the richness of character achieved by the rest of the cast.  Each member of the ensemble cast has only a few minutes of screen-time to make an impact, and most of them nail that moment.  Particularly praiseworthy are wine-swilling but loving mom Rose Darko (Mary McDonnel), suave and sleazy motivational speaker Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze), and Jolene Purdy as Cherita Chen, the mercilessly teased, earmuff-wearing exchange student who exists to illuminate Donnie’s compassion.

Then there’s Donnie himself (Jake Gyllenhaal ).  He first appears in the guise of an insolent teen, swearing at his sister at the dinner table, smoking cigarettes, and wandering off whenever he pleases.  Then, he becomes as a figure of menace; he’s terrifying when his face sinks into that brooding frown, he pulls his sweatshirt hood up over his head, and he skulks out into the night to do Frank’s bidding.  Then, Donnie is a lone voice of reason, a prophet calling out Pharisees on their pedestals.  Finally, he ends up an object of compassion, and a genuine hero.

And, there’s one character who can’t be forgotten: Frank, who’s little more than a mask and a computer-altered voice, but who upstages even Donnie.

But, for all the originality on display, because of its convoluted and confounding plot Donnie Darko will forever remain a flawed (and therefore, perhaps more interesting) masterpiece.  Difficult to follow in theaters, where there is no rewind button to review key scenes, Donnie Darko had major critics scratching their heads as they exited the darkened moviehouses.   While watching the movie for the first time, there’s the sense that Kelly has carefully laid out a number of fascinating strands that could resolve the film, followed by a sinking feeling when it seems he ultimately picks the most implausible and least satisfying one of all.

But the movie stays with you afterward, despite confusion and disappointment, lingering in your imagination as you try to tie up loose ends and figure out the meaning to it all.

Kelly only exacerbated the problem of the unsatisfying plot resolution after the movie’s release by starting the Donnie Darko website and producing director’s commentaries that strongly defended the literal interpretation of a film that yearned for a satisfying symbolic interpretation.  An Internet cult picked up on Kelly’s cues, creating numerous FAQ’s that purported to explain the literal plot.

The film’s most ardent defenders insist that the film makes perfect logical sense, if you just think about it hard enough.  The film’s most ardent defenders are wrong.  I think that, because the film’s trajectory makes such perfect emotional sense, they’re desperate for it to also make literal narrative sense. But it doesn’t, no matter how deftly Kelly twists or how much supplemental material he produces.  (I hate to give away spoilers for a film, but I’ve created a special post, Why Donnie Darko’s Literal Plot Doesn’t Make Sense [And Why It Doesn't Matter], to refute the film’s literal plot).

Despite his public defenses of the film’s plot, there is some reason to suspect that Kelly is just trying to make it as challenging and polished as possible, rather than trying to push his interpretation as the “correct” way to view the film.  First, he literally labels a crucial plot device as a deus ex machina, even drawing extra attention to it by having his main character mutter the phrase.  Writers who want their plots to be taken seriously usually try to hide the use of an improbable contrivance, not draw attention to it.   Second, there is a point in the film where Donnie is talking to his science teacher and the conversation is leading them towards a paradox which will be impossible to resolve.  The teacher pleads out of the conversation because God has been mentioned, saying “I could lose my job” (despite the fact that he teaches at a private, not public, school).  Donnie, who was a few moments ago in the heat of a passionate argument, accepts his demurral with surprising complacency.  This acceptance foreshadows the attitude Kelly will demand the viewer adopt when he springs his paradox on them: that they voluntarily shut off the rational voice in their own head and accept events at face value, as Donnie calmly accepts his teacher’s refusal to delve further into the mysteries.

Most importantly, Kelly is too smart of a guy to believe in his own gobbledygook.  In his DVD commentary, he describes the plot as “absurd” and one that deliberately relies on “comic book logic,” at the same time he tries his damnedest to defend it.  In the end, he concedes that the audience will have to decide whether the events of Donnie Darko “really happened” or whether they were “just Donnie’s dream.”   Usually, the “it was just a dream” ending is a cop-out by a writer who can’t figure out how to end his story, but here it actually works.  The plot of Donnie Darko is exactly the kind of grandiose, apocalyptic fantasy that a brilliant but troubled, possibly schizophrenic teenager would have.  In a movie where the central character is a bright adolescent who refuses to accept society’s standard lines, Donnie’s pseudo-sensible solution to finding meaning in his life makes perfect sense.  The genius of Kelly’s film is that it recaptures the integrity, the naivete, and the longing to recreate the world in a better way that’s the hallmark of adolescence at its best.  And the movie accomplishes this feat while creating a sense of mystery and dreamlike wonder that lingers long after the credits roll.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“If this movie ever figured out what it wanted to be when it grows up, it would be a terrific one.”–Bib Graham, San Francisco Chronicle (contemporaneous)

“’Donnie Darko’ is a stunning technical accomplishment that virtually bursts with noise, ideas and references, but it’s fundamentally a gracefully crafted movie that’s about human beings and not images… Kelly himself has suggested that ‘Donnie Darko’ is the story of Holden Caulfield filtered through the paranoid sci-fi consciousness of Philip K. Dick, but frankly he’s selling himself short; whatever its flaws, this movie is more soulful and less self-absorbed than those sources might suggest.” –Andrew O’Hehir, Salon (DVD)

“In [my] 2001 review, I found a lot to admire and enjoy in ‘Donnie Darko,’ … My objection was that you couldn’t understand the movie, which seemed to have parts on order. With the director’s cut, I knew going in that I wouldn’t understand it, so perhaps I was able to accept it in a different way. I ignored logic and responded to tone, and liked it more…. ‘Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut’ is alive, original and intriguing. It’s about a character who has no explanation for what is happening in his life, and is set in a world that cannot account for prescient rabbits named Frank. I think, after all, I am happier that the movie doesn’t have closure. What kind of closure could there be?”—Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (Director’s Cut review)

OFFICIAL SITE: Donnie Darko

IMDB LINK: Donnie Darko (2001)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:  This site’s own Why Donnie Darko’s Literal Plot Doesn’t Make Sense (And Why It Doesn’t Matter)

Stainless Steel Rat’s Donnie Darko FAQ

Everything You Were Afraid to Ask About ‘Donnie Darko’ – a lucid plot explanation from Salon.com

Donnie Darko in His Mind’s Eye – a Freudian interpretation of Donnie Darko by Jim Emerson

Cellar Door - a collection of Donnie Darko resources and links for the hardcore fan, including the pages from The Philosophy of Time Travel

DVD INFO: Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut (buy) is available in a two-disc special edition, featuring Richard Kelly’s commentary with fellow hip director Kevin Smith, a production diary, and a two short documentaries focusing on fans reactions to the film.

The tighter theatrical cut (buy) is superior to the director’s cut, and contains two separate commentary tracks, deleted scenes and other featurettes that don’t appear on the Director’s Cut.  Unfortunately, it is harder to find than the Director’s Cut edition.  In fact, I am afraid that DVDs of the original cut will be discontinued and become collector’s items, which would be a crime.    It appears that the upcoming Blu-Ray release will contain the theatrical cut, probably in an attempt to encourage people to buy an entirely new machine to watch the original masterpiece. 

NOTE (2/13/2009):  My pessimism turned out to be unwarranted, as the Blu-Ray version (buy) contains both cuts of the movie, as it should, making this the definitive Donnie Darko disc–for those who have Blu-Ray.

DIRECTED BY:  Nicolas Roeg

FEATURING:  Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie

PLOT: John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) lose their daughter in a freak drowning accident. Life goes on, however, and they travel to Venice as planned, where John is directing the restoration of a Gothic cathedral. While there, they meet a blind psychic woman who tells them she can see their daughter, and John begins to catch glimpses out of the corner of his eye of a red-hooded figure that looks suspiciously like his drowned daughter.

BACKGROUND:

• This was director Nicolas Roeg’s third film, after Performance (1970) and Walkabout (1971). The movie was adapted from a short story by the British novelist Daphne du Maurier, whose works also inspired Rebecca and The Birds.
• The love scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland was so graphic for the time that (unverified) rumors persisted that they had actually had intercourse on the set.  Roeg has since dismissed the rumors.
• Some of the style of the film may have been influenced by Italian giallos of the period, though this connection has been exaggerated simply because of the Venetian setting.
• Don’t Look Now is #8 on the British Film Institute’s list of the all-time great British films.

INDELIBLE IMAGE : The color red. (More would constitute a spoiler).

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Don’t Look Now is subtly unnerving—perhaps too

Trailer for Don’t Look Now narrated by John Landis (courtesy of Trailers from Hell)

subtly—throughout. But the last 20 minutes are a truly unsettling, nightmarish experience, capped by a shocking, largely unexplained resolution that leaves it to the viewer to solve the film’s mystery. By the end, the city of Venice has turned into a strangely deserted, Gothic labyrinth that may haunt your nightmares.

COMMENTS: Near the opening of Don’t Look Now is a fast-moving montage in which key images are repeated, echoed, and transformed. Although the significance of all the symbols won’t be clear to the viewer at first, the sequence is a masterpiece of imagery, the effect subliminally hypnotic. Near the end of Don’t Look Now is a hyperkinetic montage of images from the film that come at the eye like shards of shattered glass. It’s as if the movie’s own life is flashing before its eyes.

In between these bravura sequences is a movie that is nearly a masterpiece.  Don’t Look Now is an intricately constructed puzzle that requires thought on the audience’s part to sort out.  The final resolution is nearly perfect for this sort of film: the literal narrative ties up loose ends in a tight, if unexpected, package.  As a symbolic expression of John Baxter’s failure to come to grips with the death of his child, it also satisfyingly closes the door and turns out the light on the main character’s psychological reality.  But the ending is also so—weird—that it suggests further interpretations that lie beneath the surface. Did it really happen that way, just as the narrative says? Or did the story actually end some time before: were the last twenty nightmarish minutes just an expressionist dream?

The reason that Don’t Look Now is nearly a masterpiece is that it has one terrible flaw.  For long stretches between those opening and closing montages, it commits the one sin that no movie should ever commit: it’s boring.  After the couple gets to Venice, Roeg spends a lot of time focusing on the ordinariness of John and Laura’s domestic life.  It’s true that underneath that surface of that ordinariness lurks the couple’s shared grief over the death of their daughter, and the separate ways in which they deal with that sorrow.  But their differences don’t explode into vicious disagreements arguments often enough to keep the viewer’s interest.  In fact, throughout most of the center part of the movie, they seem to be coping with the tragedy unexpectedly well: life goes on, they focus on their work, they have sex, they dress and go to dinner.  Their wounds seem long healed, and Roeg chooses not to pick at their scars.

In a way, the celebrated sex scene between Sutherland and Christie is a microcosm of what’s wrong with Don’t Look Back, rather than what’s right about it.  The coupling is not gratuitous; it serves an obvious plot function, coming as it does so soon after Laura has seemed to come to grips with her daughter’s death.  The viewer supplies the missing detail: the couple hasn’t made love like this since the tragedy.  The scene is intercut with a scene of the couple dressing for dinner, another indication of normality and ordinariness. But the scene, while it temporarily wakes the viewer up from his slumber, goes on far too long after it has served its purpose.  It’s symptomatic of the film’s overall disinterst in moving the plot along quickly.  There are entire scenes and characters in the movie that don’t advance the story at all, scenes of John discussing work with the bishop or eating arrangements with the proprietor of his pensione.  Much of the time, the viewer’s mind is drifting, observing at the Venetian scenery rather than at the subtle cues on the faces of the main characters.  And while this sort of backdrop of banality creates an excellent contrast to the dreamlike world John will soon find himself trapped in, it does not make for a compelling watching experience.

The film runs 110 minutes, which is twenty minutes longer than average.  Had Roeg found twenty minutes of domestic fat to trim, the film may truly have turned out as the masterpiece that many critics claim.  As it is, too many viewers actually give up on the film before they make it to the payoff, which is surely not what the filmmakers had hoped for.  In the end, Don’t Look Now is a film that plays better in the memory than onscreen, and also a film that is much better on a second viewing—with a finger always poised near the fast-forward button.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a fragile soap bubble of a horror film. It has a shiny surface that reflects all sorts of colors and moods, but after watching it for a while, you realize you’re looking not into it, but through it and out the other side. The bubble doesn’t burst, it slowly collapses, and you may feel, as I did, that you’ve been had.”–Vincent Camby, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“Roeg’s film is a characteristically elliptical and genuinely unsettling affair, heightened by a palpable sense of atmosphere and ominous portent in which nothing is what it seems… an undeniably key work in British cinema.” –David Wood, BBC (video)

“After 25 years, ‘Don’t Look Now’ still has the power to frighten and disorient — to suggest a world that’s perilous, cruel and out of control.  Roeg… created an atmosphere thick with portents and subliminal clues and edited the film in a fractured manner that distorts time and perception.” –Edward Guthmann, San Francisco Chronicle (re-release)

IMDB ENTRY:  Don’t Look Now (1973)

DVD INFO:  The Paramount DVD release (Buy) contains no extras, except for the original trailer.