Insomnia (1997)

BEFORE STIEG LARSSON (or more ironically, his death) introduced the world to Lisbeth Salander, Scandinavian crime drama had already developed a durable and distinctive model spanning cinema, television, and text. Its plots explored the tacit tension between progressive societies and provincial prejudice, half-hearted protagonists with misanthropic streaks, and a melancholic pallor unique to the lands of the midnight sun. Larsson’s ‘Millennium’ books and their filmed adaptations have become the most recognized of these stories, but their very fame also decouples them from the unheroic anonymity the genre prefers. A better illustration might be Erik Skjoldbjærg’s ‘Insomnia’ from 1997, which follows Jonas Engström (Stellan Skarsgård), a disgraced Swedish detective, to a remote Norwegian town north of the Arctic Circle to solve the murder of a teenage girl. It’s an unremarkable premise, assuredly among the oldest in crime fiction. But if one cliché may allow another, ‘the devil is in the details’ and in ‘Insomnia’ they are sinister indeed.

The film is shot without much glamor, professionally albeit with an apparently limited budget and on-location. The cinematography has a washed-out, documentarian feel starkly enhanced by the super-8 styling of its startling opening sequence. Soon after meeting Engström we feel as though we’re behind the scenes of an episode of ‘Cops’ to intimate and explicit for public broadcast.When the detective arrives to town it is beset by fog and dusky despite the midnight sunlight. He has little knowledge of his new colleagues, the case at hand, or the land itself; the fog seems to shrouds many paths into the future and provides no hints of which to take. Then, in a moment of forgivable confusion, he makes a terrible mistake and his world starts fading into white. Not black. Rather, a perpetual light that slowly sinks him into isolated chambers lacking continuity with the world beyond. Standing in an apartment and looking towards the window, all we see is a blinding brightness that refuses to give way. Engström is locked inside an open cage, in sleepless purgatory. And then ‘Insomnia’ truly begins.

The role is perfect for Skarsgård: looming, weary, soft-spoken, yet at times brutally forceful, we believe both his temerity and his ambivalence. In the land of the midnight sun he is a perpetual shadow. His relationships with other characters are quite vaguely sketched, but absolutely meticulous blocking gives the attentive viewer all he needs to know. In groups of two or three, characters subtly orbit through three-quarters shot to reflect the constantly changing power dynamics. Sometimes they enter the frame at an unexpected angle or at a strange interval, as if the film was jump-cut and we blinked a second too long. Or, like Engström, we fell prey to a sleepless exhaustion. The dialogue, meanwhile, is straightforward and largely procedural—only by watching the visual cues (how the camera disguises a face, how a character meets or avoids another’s eyes) can we fully appreciate the forces at play. For Engström is not one to betray his intentions, not least after he has become complicit in the very case he’s investigating.

In this sense it is hard to classify this film as a character study, since it does not sufficiently explore or reveal Engström’s character. At the beginning we get hints of his background—disgrace in Sweden, virtual banishment to the boondocks—and at the end his future remains unclear. A minimalist score by Biosphere, largely ambient/electronic, also gives us precious few cues. It is not the director’s intent, nor that of his co-screenwriter Nikolaj Frobenius, for us to reflect on Engström as an archetype or dissect him as a specimen. But neither is he a cipher, simply channeling his environment without coloring it. To the contrary, his flaws and failures directly cause everything in ‘Insomnia’ aside from the murder that began it. The story simply exists.

Only once the film is through do we realize what a tightrope it has walked, between gratuity and obfuscation, obsession and apathy, unavoidable concrete evidence and pure fabrication. And though Engström’s life is weary, callous, unsympathetic, and locked in a downward spiral, the viewer does not feel belabored or tortured by the viewing. Skjoldbjærg is not concerned with shock and awe, nor is his main character a long-suffering masochist whose soul-wrenching distress is visited upon his audience with mordant glee (looking at you, Darren Aronofksy). Neither are we left cold by the proceedings—we feel alarm and dismay, some revulsion and exhaustion all—but there remains a foundation of sobriety and somberness that allows us to engage the narrative as it if were a vivid police report and not an abusive rite of passage. The film ends with a long cut of Engström riding away in the back of a car, caught but not captured, with his deadened eyes looking almost directly into the camera as if to ask, ‘who are you to judge?’

A 2002 remake by Christopher Nolan starred Al Pacino and Robin Williams. (Amidst decades of ebullient joy, in that one year Williams unleashed a lifetime of villainy in ‘Death to Smoochy’ and ‘One Hour Photo’ besides.) Predictably, it spent too much of its energies on the mind games of its characters and too little on the environment that birthed them. The difference is critical: people end, places don’t. And this is the sober center of the Scandinavian model, where the petty lunacy of man plays out across indifferent landscapes. Our greed may mar their surfaces over the years, but their influence on us is far more final. Their indefinite expanse defies the closure human stories crave, and they outlast us. Sleepless.

Rebecca (1940)

THOUGH FAR FROM Alfred Hitchcock’s first film (or even his fifteenth), ‘Rebecca’ is likely the most crucial turning point in the director’s august career. He had previously directed financially successful films in Britain, some of which are still celebrated today (e.g. ‘The 39 Steps’), but it was ‘Rebecca’ that won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 19490 and launched his American career.

Compared with his pulse-pounding 50s output (‘Psycho’, ‘Vertigo’, ‘North by Northwest’), some viewers may find ‘Rebecca’ to be rather prim. Indeed, it is a decidedly British tale, migrating from a Monte Carlo hotel patronized by old money and their paid companions to a ludicrously overstaffed estate in southern England called Manderly. It is the home of one Maxim de Winter, a high-society type who abjures such middle-class trifles as children, chores, or a salaried profession; we enter it alongside his new wife, Mrs. De Winter the second (whose maiden name is never given), an ordinary girl woefully out of place amidst silk-gloved servants. Her status as a commoner is accentuated further by the appearance of a pin-striped and monstrously-lapelled in-law named Favell (George Sanders, preeminent among English archetypes in all of cinematic history), whose role is modest but pivotal.

A view of ‘Rebecca’ as blue-blooded and old-fashioned does not err. It is a film of retrospection, both in the literal plot as well as its presentation, harking to such ghostly precedents as ‘Topper’ (1936) in light-hearted moments and Henry James’ novella ‘The Turn of the Screw’ (1898) as it darkens. Yet such scenarios as these, so strictly meted out and miserly in ‘action’, were essential in developing Hitchcock’s signature style and knack for claustrophobia. To wit: implied tension is more excruciating than explicit acts; what happens off-screen is more terrible than what we can actually see; and our imagination is the greatest and darkest villain of all.

Consider the trajectory between ‘Rebecca’ and 1946’s ‘Notorious’, a highly topical film about hunting escaped Nazis a year after VE-Day and heavily weighted by sexual tension. These surface-level themes are wholly absent from ‘Rebecca’, where the young Mrs. De Winter is treated like a child and the outside world is utterly inconsequential. Yet in tracing the line back from ‘Notorious’ we can see how the blueprints match up: a plot with minimal physical conflict centered around a female protagonist, imprisoned in her own house and molested by specters of the past that stretch out suffocating fingers. That same dread is palpably clear in ‘Rebecca’. Absent of flashing kitchen knives or close shaves with crop dusters it reveals more clearly the foundation of Hitchcock’s enduring monument.

We never actually meet Rebecca in the film, but it doesn’t take long to learn that she is the deceased first wife of Mr. De Winter. And though we never so much as see her face, her wardrobe, embroidered handkerchief, precisely positioned toiletry, and her funereally aloof housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, ensure that Rebecca is present in every frame. Rebecca is the breath that whispers in and out of Manderly’s vaulted ribs and Mrs. Danvers her avatar, haunting the new Mrs. De Winters through the halls like a morbid Virgil. Another allusion is stronger still: up a long approach and perched upon the hilltop, Manderly resembles the sepulchral castle of Graf Orlock—the Nosferatu—the Victorian embodiment of repressed sexuality. In ‘Rebecca’ our monster is the imprisoning precedent of aristocracy, and it preys upon Mrs. De Winter mercilessly.

As Mrs. De Winter, Joan Fontaine has a guileless optimism that suits the role—young, naïve, but clever and sweet in a down-to-earth way that was enough to sweep Maxim out of his despair, for a time. Alas, this unaffected spirit also leaves her quite overmatched by the debonair Olivier, a natural fit for Maxim. He would be a playboy if he cared to, rather flip for all his good culture, possessing a fabulous wealth towards which he is breezily indifferent yet naturally in command. In his late 30s at the time, he projects a playboy’s vivacity but has enough gravitas to make us believe his fretful brow and weary eyes. The bond between Olivier and Fontaine never quite settles, though, and the psychological burden of Rebecca eventually becomes too much for Fontaine to bear. Her left eyebrow arches most delicately, her head shakes almost imperceptibly, and a shadow of a smile tugs at one corner of her mouth, disbelieving but striving for appeal like a tentative pet. It’s a camera-ready look that wins us early but is too shallow to keep us long.

Thus the film’s finale—a showy inquest, an increasingly dispossessed Maxim, and the suddenly scheming cousin Favell (that’d be George Sanders)—undercuts the creeping psychology of the earlier acts, where Olivier and Fontaine strove to establish some kind of chemistry undistracted by outside elements. The more actors on screen and the higher the stakes, the less convincing the central couple becomes. Only the implicit presence of Rebecca herself can bring them together in the end, despite all her specter did to destroy them.

‘Rebecca’ the film makes it through this rocky patch, albeit a bit worse for the wear, pushed on by Hitchcock’s macabre energies and pulled by an unsung secondary cast. The most choice of these is the De Winters’ accountant, Frank Crawley, played with a hangdog stoicism by Reginald Denny. He is a legitimizing and sturdy center amidst a melodramatic sweep of big personalities and bigger set-pieces, granting everyday audiences a perspective from which to watch the dreadful strains of their noble betters. But not yet to internalize those fears and take them home.

The Machinist (2004)

FOR A WHILE, ‘The Machinist’ compels its audience to reexamine the structures of our world, from minute letterforms of mysterious notes to the nearly alien protuberance of water towers. Or the reptilian bristling of a human skeleton beneath its husk of flesh. Our specimen is Trevor, a factory machinist played by Christian Bale, who beyond his trademark mental focus brings a physicality that is simply harrowing. But not in the traditional way we think of when actors ‘beef up’ for a role; rather, he is wasting away, frail and dangerously emaciated. Repulsive, even. But in a way calculated, precise, and for more than mere shock value. His gauntness is revealed explicitly and borne witness to by other characters, as well as a pillar of Post-It notes descending down his wall like a march through the layers of a personal hell we cannot yet fathom. The body incidental to Christian Bale separates from the actor and becomes a physical sketch of Trevor’s mind: a rigid tool, a flagging system of levers and pulleys on the verge of seizing up. The cause of this decline is not initially explained, much less even known, and rooting it out becomes ‘The Machinist’s sole focus.

Bale has a compulsion towards dualist roles: Trevor is a shadow of Patrick Bates, his sociopath murderer in ‘American Psycho’, and both preceded his epic arc as Batman in Christopher Nolan’s trilogy reboot. Bale is no less arresting here, aptly juggling the increasing demands of compulsion, apathy, subconscious suppression and obsession, as well as making Trevor more a tragic character than a pitiful one. We see, can gauge, and connect together the man he is, was, and is becoming—each wildly different from the next and yet still fathomable. In pitting Trevor’s mordant subconscious against the ennui and increasing derangement of his conscious mind, ‘The Machinist’ also raises uncomfortable psychological questions rarely addressed in the genre, even as it revels in many of the most basic horror tropes. Can masochism be productive? When does the self-preservation instinct lead not to survival but to decay? Though the framing of these questions is hardly erudite (blood seeping out of refrigerators, etc.), it’s sufficient to elevate ‘The Machinist’ above typical psycho/slasher horror fare.

Our Plato along this left-hand path is Ivan, a substitute shift worker Trevor meets while venting his frustration alone in the parking lot outside his job. Ivan is a singular presence: shaven bullet-shaped head, a shark’s grin, cowboy’s cocksure swagger, and the meaty frame of a football lineman. One of his hands was mangled in an accident and now boasts transplanted toes for fingers. He is always cool, always smiling, but never comforting. Trevor is the only man who can see him. Based on decades of such setups in cinema the audience instantly assumes that Ivan is in Trevor’s mind. And we are right, of course. But ‘The Machinist’ never disguised this fact (from us, at least; Trevor himself is more perplexed), and thus must make itself intriguing in other ways. We ask not whether what Trevor sees is real, but rather why. It’s a root too rarely unearthed in most psychological thrillers, which are often content to gloss over the origin of psychosis to spend more time reveling in its fallout.

 

The counter to Ivan—unreal but brutally concrete—is Stevie—real but all too fragile. She is Trevor’s prostitute, whom he comes to care for and depend upon for solace as his world begins to crumble. In turn she loves him, grasps onto him as an escape from her downward spiral, and for a brief interlude they seem at peace. Nearly happy. Crucially, a real sense of tenderness is created between the two, such that we believe Trevor’s retreat into her arms even as he falls away from everything else. If we can’t empathize with his pitiful state directly, at least she acts as a conduit for our compassion. Amidst all the other tangles that eventually overmatch ‘The Machinist’s ambition, the knot of Trevor and Stevie holds fast.

Those tangles are not loose ends, though. All the relevant pieces of ‘The Machinist’ come together in a logical way, such that we needn’t fuss over abandoned subplots or affected mystery over what really happened. ‘The Machinist’, like its name, fits together cleanly and effectively into a full cycle. So how then is it overmatched? Simply put: clarity is not always quality. After posing a sly, insidious question and spreading a dank miasma, ‘The Machinist’ wields neither tool to full effect and comes off the worse for failing to achieve its potential. Moreover, enough of its endgame is telegraphed early that the few mysteries left till later end up having little leverage.

The film begins in obscure darkness, stark chiaroscuro, and hazy window-looking views that meticulously recreate Trevor’s mental fog. Yet the visual arc of his character, even as he’s pulled into revelatory madness and despair, is actually decreasingly bleak: the sky loses its apocalyptic hues, his world seems less a nightmarish nowhere-land prison and more a sunny California suburb. We find him in darkness and leave him in light. This reversal makes sense for the character but can leave the audience dissatisfied and imbalanced. The score also teases us into ambivalence, at points melancholic and sparse, at others so instructive with its spooky tip-toeing or garish violin sighs that one struggles to give Trevor’s nightmare the weight Bale’s performance deserves.

Based upon a series of creeping realizations, the film features many slow shots of a gape-mouthed Trevor noticing something close to the camera, approaching it tentatively, and grappling to fathom its meaning. Bale makes the shot work repeatedly, leaving the audience uncomfortably curious about what is sitting beside us out in the darkness, but the technique tires as the plot’s trajectory become clear. Too, the flashbacks and frequent cues to the audience don’t always focus on the most relevant material. Rehashing old content for new emphasis tends to be didactic anyway, but if it must be done, then better to return to such fraught episodes as the Route 666 carnival ride (which we come to recognize as the linchpin of Trevor’s psyche) than the known quantity of a face in a fishing trophy photograph. And after meticulously establishing each implicit point of tension, the full crux of Trevor’s affliction is revealed in a flat rush, as if finishing a game by rote instead of inspiration. And that is ‘The Machinist’ in brief: a powerful engine engaged, but idling.

The Game (1997)

IN ITS EARLY STAGES ‘The Game’ lays out one tantalizing tarot card after another with a nearly perfect smirking patience. A tinkering, Satie-tinged piano play over silent and savaged old footage of a midcentury wedding and a young boy, somehow uncertain, whose father recedes from their photo pose like a specter into the darkness behind them. By the time we snap to modernity and Michael Douglas’s craggy face looks up at us into the mirror, we already feel as though we’ve sifted through the shoeboxes of his memo-aerie. He is Nicholas Van Orton, an investment banker whose world is filled with emptiness; his every movement sends reverberations into the vacant spaces that wall him off from human contact and emotion of any kind. He is deeply unsympathetic as an adult, but with our fleeting view into his childhood we are compelled to attend his impassive sleepwalking.

Maintaining this pensive tone is critical to the film’s development, especially in the first two acts when we’re still running on faith in Van Orton that he has yet to substantiate. And the twisted proposition that comes to him on his birthday—“The Game”—is a simultaneously familiar yet foreign blend of meta-fantasy and alternate realities that hardly seems suited to a man of such muted interests. Indeed, the reasons for his participation at all are not well substantiated, even later in the film when explosive family arguments reveal the dynamic long at work behind the scenes. And that is ‘The Game’s largest, and arguably only relevant, flaw—its product is solid, but the sales pitch doesn’t fly.

First the good. Fincher’s direction is taut and pragmatic while retaining touches of grace, and his characteristically dark treatments suffuse the sets with shadows, enhancing Van Orton’s solitude as well as the feeling that he is a performer on the stage. Douglas, for his part, plays the tightly-wound skeptic with magnificent ease, never pushing the drama of a moment too far or outpacing the natural momentum of the plot. His mania and our tension both culminate at the same bewildering moment, high atop a nameless office building in San Francisco, and in a daze he follows his father in a muffled tumble to the ground so far below.

Then the twist upon the twist (x3?) suddenly comes full circle, the final shoe of this arachnid set drops to the floor. But there are only so many times an audience, much less a protagonist, can buy the “No, seriously, this time I’m telling the truth,” line without simply wanting to disengage. Or call the emergency line provided to him, which Van Orton never seems to do, even in the early going when he clearly wasn’t digging the ride but hadn’t yet come to view his ‘playmates’ as a murderous international crime syndicate on par with SPECTRE. Our voyage through ‘The Game’ is an exciting one, but its hull is never made sound before castoff, and upon swinging back round into port we finally realize the absurd contortions of the tour we’ve taken. One is not inclined to reflect on the lessons of Van Orton’s personal odyssey or his rebirth; rather, the heinous risks and vast ridiculousness of retrospection turn his harrowing gauntlet into a ludicrous carousel. And the thought of a sullenly staring, suspendered-in-shirtsleeves Michael Douglas riding a bobbing unicorn is just too, too much.

Following/Doodlebug (1998/97)

JUSTIFIABLY, CHRISTOPHER NOLAN has become one of the new millennium’s top-flight names in Hollywood. His Batman trilogy redefined the paradigm of superhero films, while others like ‘Memento’ and ‘The Prestige’ follow unique and often ambivalent protagonists through cerebral and tortuous plots. ‘Inception’, frankly, was an upended bag of magician’s tricks (i.e. a hot mess), but one of such scale, intensity, and spectacular visuals that we have to at least respect the effort necessary to make it. However invigorating the characterizations or reverent the photography, though, the impetus running through all of film is one of the art’s most elementary: action. Action as a means to explain, to engage, and to validate. As the prime mover of film, superseding any representation of shared pathos, individual epiphany, or any expression fundamentally greater than the plot twists we witness between the first clapboard and the last. Of course some action (read: movement) is necessary in all film to distinguish it from photography, but Nolan’s action is more the kind writ large: Action! And it’s all for the purpose of ‘the twist’, which never fails to arrive and always strives to leave audiences asking excitedly ‘What just happened?’, while never caring much for the ‘Why?’

It may be unfair to criticize Nolan for not being an art film director steeped in metaphysical musings, but he has certainly become one of our era’s most prominent auteurs, and one discussed on an increasingly scholarly level. His first film, ‘Following’, has recently been re-released by Criterion, signally an acceptance of Nolan into an exclusive company of critically-acclaimed, often even ‘Important Films’ enjoyed by audiences a cut or two above the average popcorn-popper.

To be sure, ‘Following’ was due for a re-release. Like Darren Aronofsky’s ‘Pi’, it’s a true debut shot in black-and-white on a scraped-thin budget, featuring friends as crew members and the houses of their families for (some) sets. And it is instructive to see how Nolan’s style has developed since the 90s, so different in presentation and yet so aligned in spirit to his hundred-million dollar films of today. But viewing ‘Following’ as well as ‘Doodlebug’ (an included short feature from ’97), does more to undermine Nolan’s work today than to enhance it, for it underscores how inextricable ‘the twist’ is from his method. It is its own conclusion, satisfying and justifying itself, and everything that comes before it is merely the showy preamble. So what really separates Nolan from the likes of M Night Shymalan, once a celebrated thriller of the 90s and now a byword for hackneyed and redundant?

Plenty, it seems at first. All the technical skills are surely improved and rightly commemorated. Right-hand man Wally Pfister is a gifted cinematographer, Nolan has a knack for blending large-scale drama with visceral momentum, and most of his ideas have an undeniable cool factor that is harder to parody than predictable ghost stories. His characters are more deeply rendered, too, and the actors often perform better as a result. But if ‘Following’ is the gestation of those skills and ‘The Prestige’ their ripened peak, then ‘Inception’ was their inevitable rotten decline. Back to the roots, then.

In ‘Following’, our story opens and closes in a sparsely furnished room where a slight, weasely man is explaining the habit of his that gives the film its name. It very much is a ‘just because’ kind of premise, but before this unnamed man wears thin we run into a more kinetic presence that gets the film up and running. This is Cobb, a smooth-talking doer of things (burgling, mostly), and not much one for reflection. As such, he’s the perfect mouthpiece for Nolan, constantly thrusting the plot through its many steps with an indefatigable momentum over other characters’ occasional protests, though those are never particularly loud. He pulls us along, too, so completely that when the last piece of these tricky trap door locks clicks into place we’ve hardly had time to suspect what might be coming. But that surprise isn’t necessarily a good thing for two reasons: firstly, it doesn’t leave the audience feeling half so bereft as it does the main character, whom we’ve never had much cause to care about. Secondly, this rug pulled out from beneath our feet highlights just how hard and dull the floor was in the first place. In other words, Nolan’s trick is cleverly executed, but the big finish doesn’t stand for much other than itself.

‘Following’ is also the debut of Nolan’s non-linear style of narrative flow, which became the defining element in his next film, ‘Memento’. This method requires great care and attention from a director in all facets of production, but it also helps to mask many shortcomings in character development since we spend more time trying to fit the pieces together and examining their edges than beholding the finished product.

The same end-all approach defines ‘Doodlebug’, a short amusement that exists more as a technical feat than any artistic statement—an amuse-bouche for our eyes, but with no substantiating entrée to follow. Given, not much more could be expected from a wordless film of three minutes; the evident problem is that Nolan extrapolates this same attitude over his feature length pictures. In that broader context, his hazy sketches of character motivations and ceaseless teleology becomes harder to justify and less easy to ignore. His characters may be complex, but are so merely to justify their equally convoluted means of escape, retribution, victory, et cetera.

Given all this, it’s unsurprising that Nolan has writing credits for almost every one of his films. The one for which he has none is the remake of ‘Insomnia’, regarded by many as his worst major release. His best films—the Batman trilogy, ‘Memento’, and ‘The Prestige’—are also the only ones co-written by his brother, Jonathan. Given Christopher’s form, how could it be otherwise? More than either a director or a writer, he is a presenter, gifted in his way but consumed by his own momentum, more eager to click through his own glamorous slideshows than engage the audience in a meaningful exchange. And once we can print them out to flip through at our leisure, straightening their sly coils and noting a few highlights before skipping to the end, how long before it all gets tossed into the bin?

Mulholland Drive (2001)

DELIBERATELY OUTRÉ, occasionally absurd, and above all hauntingly weird in its blend of naïve optimism and sinister subplots, ‘Mulholland Drive’ might seem like David Lynch’s answer to the Coen Brothers’ ‘The Big Lebowski’. Each surname has evolved into an adjective—Lynchian, Coenesque—or school of iconoclastic filmmaking that threads deep sardonicism through comedy and deadpan irony through drama. Though Lynch started working before the Coens, his ‘Mulholland Drive’ appeared a few years after ‘The Big Lebowski’ and became its nightmarish negative. LA has never seemed so surrealistic and yet so right.

But to set the Coens’ effort as a precedent for Lynch is to do him a disservice—in work like ‘Blue Velvet’, ‘Twin Peaks’, and even the clunky ‘Lost Highway’, Lynch had long been establishing the groundwork and defining the archetypes that would all come together in ‘Mulholland Drive’: starry-eyed out-of-towner arrives to a cesspool of conspiracy; a cabal of attractive actresses, often unknown at the time, delve into its opaque depths; the one (or maybe two) guys play it straight to give the audience just enough of a wink; a ghoulish or misshapen stranger lurks on the periphery and pronounces obscure doom; erstwhile stars in hardly glamorous cameos; and every frame cast with an indistinctly nostalgic air that belies the film’s millennial setting. ‘Mulholland Drive’ is the complete Lynch experience encapsulated—and it may be his best picture.

There is stiff competition from ‘Blue Velvet’, made when Lynch was 40, a few films into his career, and still exploring the boundaries of his style. Though the ‘Lynchian’ precedent was already clearly extant, the director was still stretching and flexing some of his muscles for the first time and it made ‘Blue Velvet’ powerful in a vigorously applied, confrontational manner. Fast-forward 15 years and we find Lynch confident, capable, and fully aware. He effects equal results from his actors and similarly strong reactions from his audience with less force and greater poise. ‘Mulholland Drive’, aside from its excess of toplessness, is a less gratuitous film than ‘Blue Velvet’, but no less memorable of one.

Moreover, it is a greater mystery. ‘Blue Velvet’ had its almost too-earnest sleuth in Kyle McLachlan (just as ‘Lebowski’ had its Dude), and both of those films play off many existing tropes of Hollywood detective tales before providing some kind of release in resolution. We may not be able to fathom the bizarreness of their characters, but at least we can understand what happened. Meanwhile, ‘Mulholland Drive’ trumps both boldly by never solving its mystery. Though it has a sleuth of equal measure—a Nancy Drew-type go-getter in Naomi Watts—it is never Lynch’s intent for us to achieve that definitive moment of eureka. Rather, he satisfies us implicitly while frustrating us explicitly, and that is a balance most difficult to acquire.

The unresolved and sprawling plot, profound complexity of detail, gleans of red herrings, and chopped-up narrative subject ‘Mulholland Drive’ to virtually limitless interpretation. It is more ambiguous than ‘Twin Peaks’, which left us pining for its atmosphere and characters, and yet more efficient than ‘Lost Highway’, which left us apathetic towards them and everything else. Plenty of plots are confusing without actually being good, of course; what makes ‘Mulholland Drive’ different is the breadth and depth of its execution. As for the plot—it is a ball of twine by Escher, so seamlessly ornate that we cannot prove that there are any loose ends because we don’t know where one thread ends and another begins. But we feel that Lynch does, crucially, and that he is not inclined to reveal his secrets.

Behind the camera he is in peak form, comfortable in many settings outside of his central plot and compelling in all of them. Among other demonstrations of his art, we are treated to a smattering of art-film non sequiturs, satirical anecdotes of Hollywood woven in as subplots, and one reveal to rival any horror film for searing memorability—and in broad daylight, no less. Examine each closely and they become distinct, almost irreconcilable case studies; but step back, and the ensemble creates a unique and beguiling portrait on the very cusp of reason.

In ‘Mulholland Drive’, the pleasure comes in undertaking the journey, not reaching the destination. For there is none, really, and our joy is not to arrive, but rather not to know where we were even going. Like Rita in the limousine, we are being chauffeured somewhere strange—the fact that we never recognize a destination doesn’t mean we didn’t arrive.

Lost Highway (1997)

EVEN WHEN THEY RUN ASTRAY, David Lynch films rarely remind the audience of anything else they’ve seen before. Though they do often contain familiar tropes—from idyllic portraits of small town America lost in time to eldritch, doomsaying specters only one character can see—Lynch packages them so distinctly as to establish his own world. His own word: ‘Lynchian’. They are singular entries into the canon of film.

For the most part. ‘Lost Highway’, alas, is not one such film, though it begins with promise. At its open, we are introduced to the Madisons, an LA couple who speak to one another almost only in whispers. Husband Fred (Bill Pullman) s a squinting tenor sax player prone to foggy interludes; wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) is a slinky type who picks up the morning paper in a black slip and high heels. In watching them drift past one another mutely during the day and come together lethargically at night, one wonders what happened to their love.

These first 45 minutes are enveloped in prolonged silence, minimal dialogue, and murky sweeps of a red-drenched house full of shadows instead of corners. Their residence, light aggressively in daylight from the outside and looking like a white bastion, inside is shown like the furrowed passages of a brain. Or the Black Lodge, from ‘Twin Peaks’. Followed to its end, this could have been a deeply meditative work, and a new facet of Lynch’s mysterious prism. But then a devilishly grinning Robert Blake (literally the ‘Mystery Man’) shows up at a party and gives Fred a serious spook. With this, the lurking weirdness has been pushed out into the open, and from the first act’s plodding morass, several swift revelations thrust us into a completely new setting, new cast, and virtually brand new film. Suddenly we’re following Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty), a taciturn young man with no recollection of one particular night that his parents and friends hesitate to explain. Eventually he runs into Patricia Arquette all over again, except this time she isn’t Renee, she’s Alice. She makes advances upon him, the two begin meeting at motels, unbeknownst to her heavy boyfriend Ed (Lou Eppolito), and the unanswered questions begin to pile up. This has all been rather Lynchian indeed thus far.

But it’s also felt rather off-the-cuff, and as the second act progresses it begins to feel even aimless. And like Alice, whom we soon learn is something of a succubus, ‘Lost Highway’ becomes rather empty. Its imagery is loaded, its pregnant pauses lovingly reared, its slow-motion topless scenes unexpectedly frequent—but for what? The more Alice hints at eloping with Pete, the more Pete’s eyebrows make war with his forehead, and the closer they come to a robbery/elopement, the less ‘Lost Highway’ has to say and the more it becomes an unnecessarily fraught redux of ‘True Romance’, in which Patricia Arquette and another scowling young man (Christian Slater) end up in California on the lam after taking some fringe criminal’s stash. The two films are inverted—‘True Romance’s theft an impetus, ‘Lost Highway’s a tipping point—but the outlaw attitude is similar. Too, after the subdued first act, the explicitly scummy second overwhelms much of the lurking menace Lynch had established early on. It becomes a sophomoric erotic dream, a fitful midnight interlude we hardly recall upon waking. This is, as it happens, a rather perfect manifestation of the main characters’ inexplicable, hypnotic downfall, but it doesn’t make for a very deep viewing experience. The film’s use of music is also regrettable, with Rammstein and Marilyn Manson periodically slapped in to make club or action sequences seem more edgy. Or something. Both artists are likely fans of Lynch’s work, and Manson himself even cameos in one of the adult films playing towards the end, but both are characteristic of ‘Lost Highway’s stagey reductionism.

Perpetually dour and often voyeuristic, ‘Lost Highway’ is also quite reminiscent of ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me’, which dragged the brilliance of the show’s first season through an overzealous parade of despair, disenfranchisement, and dissolution. Better to pass on from here ‘Mulholland Drive’, which furthers Lynch’s exploration of West Coast amnesia, mistaken (or double?) identity, preternatural eroticism, et cetera, but with a far less hackneyed eye. And that’s the risk Lynch runs. When his teetering symbolism is properly balanced, we can look past its gaudy trappings and recognize a surreal genius underneath. When he stumbles, though, the act falls apart, strewing mere baubles in the dirt.

Pi (1998)

DARREN ARONOFSKY IS, in a word, ostentatious. This unfettered zeal for sensation has produced several harrowing milestones—2000’s ‘Requiem for a Dream’ first among them, 2010’s ‘Black Swan’ only the latest—earning the director plaudits as well as skeptics. ‘Pi’, his feature debut, is no less ‘big’ for its lack of superstars and miniscule budget; some viewers might even find its deliberately grainy black and white picture and lo-fi aesthetic to be just as adventurous as the CGI wonderscapes seen in 2006’s ‘The Fountain’.

But whereas ‘The Fountain’ had a deep beauty in its spaces and fine actors to inhabit them, ‘Pi’ smacks a little too much of cerebral film school chutzpah: passionate creativity unrefined and without discretion. Following the misanthrope polymath Maximillian Cohen (Sean Gullette) on his quest for the core pattern of life, ‘Pi’ radiates with the paranoia and rabidity of its protagonist. We experience in vivid detail his splitting migraines, see the world through his narrowing perspective like a pinhole camera, and begin to suspect even the slightest gesture, eschewing all coincidence. In moderation, each of these feelings is an effective point of leverage for a filmmaker to exploit. But when piled on so vigorously, the result is a numbing sensationalism that lacks for subtlety. ‘Pi’, as a result, is a tremendously loud whizz-bang, but one without much lasting force.

Throughout this charade, Sean Gullette does his best to keep us riveted to an unlikely premise. With his aquiline profile and the restless gaze of a man on the fringe, he’s a little reminiscent of actor Timothy Carey, but he does not possess Carey’s natural gravitas and instead seems to push for in performance what he lacks in character. And there is plenty of push indeed. Gullette is best as a physical actor, conveying the malcontent, suspicion, and discomfort that define Max’s internal world. But once out of his boarded-up apartment and in pursuit (or having to explain his pursuit) of The Pattern, he is considerably more wooden.

Mark Margolis is the film’s real highlight as Sol Robeson, Max’s retired mentor and a canny old prof who shuffles about a cluttered apartment delivering useful bits of plot exposition. Though he has nothing to do with the subplot concerning Max’s coveted computer chip—an awkward red herring—Margolis’s commanding performance makes the strongest case for our acceptance of Max’s mania. On the other side of Max is Lenny Meyer (Ben Shenkman), a Hasidic numerologist who entwines Max in his own sect’s obsessive quest for measurable patterns in life. The only difference is that Meyer’s answer is the name of God, whereas Max’s is the means to predict the stock market.

This discrepancy leads to a rather out-of-place theological tangent that serves as the film’s ideological climax. Max awakes—shorn, seated, and surrounded by Meyer’s cohorts—and finds himself engaged in a debate with a suddenly looming old rabbi. The stark overhead lighting invokes a prison, or a tribunal, and is beautiful to watch. But the camera does not take good advantage of the space, preferring to show each character almost exclusively in tight reverse shots, and the editing is too swift to allow the audience time to breathe in the space and feel menaced by it. And so, hurtling along without any breath left to lose, ‘Pi’s shock-and-awe physical peak becomes just an exercise in technique, not an abiding revelation.

We must also allow that Aronofksy could well have planned it all this way. His sensorial assault certainly is thorough; the film’s very title screen is an orgiastic eruption of flashing geometric symbols and equations, backed by a frenetic 90s breakbeat. Maybe it is just a New York way of filmmaking: mile-a-minute, neurotic, with every sense bombarded from every angle. So then it shall be a style worth visiting, but never for too long.

Memento (2000)

RELEASED THE SAME YEAR director Christopher Nolan turned 30, ‘Memento’ is that rare transitional film that really succeeds. It features the intimacy of a low-budget film (costing a 50^th of his recent ‘The Dark Knight Rises’) as well as the polish and professional treatment of a major studio effort. The core of its small cast is comprised of famous faces—not names—that live in front of the camera with disarming ease. The plot is deliberately tricky, a little attention-seeking in its cleverness, as an ambitious young director (and his writer brother) might be expected to concoct. But it is so tightly knit and draws such an earnest performance from its leading man, Guy Pearce that the audience is soon too caught up in Leonard Shelby’s backwards and forwards life to bother with what’s happening behind the camera lens. Pearce, a fine actor not often in fine films, is heavily tested here, needing to be charismatic without being pitiful and purposeful without the conviction of knowledge. He is sympathetic enough to like, but not so likeable that we can’t suspect him of murder or believe him when he commits it. His unwavering intensity and laissez-faire spontaneity are the two sides of his fraught personality and he flips them expertly.

Still, if this film had been told traditionally (i.e. chronologically) it would likely not have made as much of an impression: ‘The Killer is Me’ thrillers are a little too common and the murdered wife-cum-drug-dealer underbelly is more cheap 90s action than pensive millennial drama. It is lucky, then, that the Nolans and editor Dody Dorn were so precise, for, like its namesake ‘Memento’ is full of fragments that have lasting implications. Some are clues to the plot, yes—a shrug here, a scratched-out name there—but just as many are emotional nudges that give us cause to actually care: Shelby’s pyre for his wife’s ephemera; the distorted memories of her sitting on a bedside; an extra beat before the cut that captures a listless turn away, and then towards the static camera. ‘Memento’s story is told as much through these small implicit spaces as through the rigorous note-taking of its protagonist. Like Shelby’s tattooed torso, often shown, but never explored in full, ‘Memento’ reveals a great deal of itself to close scrutiny, but defies an easy explanation. It observes, trusting its audience to be engaged and attentive.

Nolan and cinematographer Wally Pfister have also created a trademark look that, if they keep at it, may eventually rank among the most iconic partnerships in cinema. Nolan’s films are vivid, but not in a playful or crayon-box kind of way (e.g. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, for whom drab seemingly does not exist). Rather, they are suffused with clear light and then color-corrected to draw out shadows and a few essential shades. It is never really quite night in Nolan’s films. Even at their darkest, a white flood tends to come from somewhere off screen and isolate or indicate where our focus should be. Naturally, these techniques are all preexisting and broadly used, but Nolan has made them his signature.

A film told in this manner must be consistent and cohesive, for its very nature ensures that it is scrutinized forwards and backwards. The traditional arcs of characters and plot, usually parallel, are inverted and blown outward onto multiple axes. In this film, Shelby’s literal journey through the plot is finished in the first scene (chronologically the last), but his character’s conflict is actually resolved in the very last (chronologically very early). This raises further questions about the nature of narrative climax, when or whether plot should supersede personalities, and other such morsels film scholars can savor at leisure. But through it all, ‘Memento’ is simply a good and well-told tale: seamless, solid, and deservedly confident.

Inception (2010)

And here it was that Nolan stepped too far into his own mind.

Alternate Review:

‘Inception’ is a film without characters, only ciphers. Bar one, all of these 150 minutes are so heavily choreographed and fiercely propelled forward by the needs of a frequently incomprehensible plot that the actors become interchangeable cardboard cutouts. Motives and character empathy are hastily glossed over as subordinate to Nolan’s consuming, self-serving vision of mad wonder. The only lasting flash of earnest, unburdened, and human interaction occurs between two supporting characters whose fates are irrelevant: Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Arthur) convinces Ellen Page (Ariadne) to kiss him in a dream in a ruse to throw off their pursuers. She’s indignant when it doesn’t work, and he replies breezily, ‘It was worth a shot.’ In that fleeting exchange, Arthur shows us more about his character to like than we ever see from Leonardo DiCaprio (Cobb), despite the latter’s perennially exhaustive exposition about the regrets that furrow his brow so deeply.

Perhaps it was Nolan’s deliberate intent to make a film as sudden, ungrounded, and perpetually inventive as the world of dreams. And in many respects, he succeeded: the special effects of ‘Inception’ are ‘visually stunning’, as trailers love to trumpet, and its wide-angle lenses and broad sets distinctive. It manages to keep adrenaline rolling for the majority of its duration—no small feat for a film nearly two-and-a-half hours long. But a couple other components are stale, such as the habit of dressing up attractive men in fancy suits, slicking their hair back severely, and giving them guns to frown over, or the diffused spread of light in every context that leaves no shadows worth looking at. Characters are constantly framed singly in static shots, forcing the camera to leap back and forth to reverse angles at a numbing pace to show us the shock or concern (and rarely much else) occurring on a character’s face. This isolation of framing reinforces the film’s fractured lack of intimacy and, once noticed, becomes nearly as distracting as the plot itself. Director of Photography Wally Pfister did a commendable job of showing us as many confusing things as clearly as possible, but in retrospect the film seems to lack for visual as well as emotional depth. Both roll out like underexposed film, passing hastily by without ever sitting long enough to achieve a lasting impression.

So if it were indeed Nolan’s intent to put dream onto film (let’s don’t even dignify the ‘8 ½’ comparisons some have made), then this was his inescapable flaw: the characters really don’t matter. In a dream, things may happen without reason, precedent, or consequence, but they usually happen to people we care about. This concern legitimates the absurdity of dreaming. But when other people talk about their dreams, much less detail them exhaustively, we are apathetic. That is, unless the dream involved us. But nearly none of us was in ‘Inception’.

The real challenge for Nolan would have been to take this dream, with all its sudden oddities and urgency, and make us care about at least someone, or something, other than the coy puzzle that closes the film. Perhaps cut out the third level of dreaming—‘a dream within a dream…within a dream’ verges on parody to begin with—and spend time actually exploring the characters, instead of just pasting in monologues here or there. This balance was better achieved in ‘The Prestige’, another mind-bending Nolan escapade, but one that knew when to let the drama behinds its grimacing visages unfold naturally, without excessive explanation. But alas, with $150 million + on hand, a secret and dangerous mission to enact, a luxury hotel to turn upside down, a James Bond-villain snow fortress to storm, and a mind-as-elevator metaphor to abuse relentlessly, who has time for organic pathos?