Jennifer Lynch's SURVEILLANCE (2008)

"You probably read the end of the book first."
"Yeah."
"That's no way to live"

SURVEILLANCE (2008)
Directed by Jennifer Lynch
Starring Bill Pullman, Julia Ormond, Michael Ironsides, Cheri Oteri, French Stewart, Kent Harper, Ryan Simpkins and Pell James

Synopsis: FBI Agents Sam Hallaway (Bill Pullman) and Elizabeth Anderson (Julia Ormond) come to a small Midwestern town to interrogate the 3 surviving victims of a brutal shoot-out.

This is a movie that is substantially less than the sum of its part.

Admittedly, Jennifer Lynch's directing career has hardly been fruitful. The last film she did was Boxing Helena about 15 years ago, and critics were less than kind to it. She broke her back and raised a kid, which took her out of the game for most of that time. She has had to suffer a lot of comparisons to her dad, heaven knows.

But the concept is strong (a series of interrogations where everyone on both sides of the table is holding something back) and Lynch pulled in a fascinating mix of has-beens, character actors and nobodies.  And she manages to get strong performances from some of them, including a child actor who is actually surprisingly good.

But, oh, how Lynch squanders it all.

First of all, you might assume this concept offers at least a couple obvious but compelling ways of telling the narrative. Perhaps you go victim by victim, showing each person's distorted version of events in ways that call the other accounts into question. Or maybe you alternate between the accounts and the investigators' attempts to make sense of them.

Or maybe you just show exactly what happens to everyone with the exception of one or two pieces of information to hold back for a "shocking" twist? Because that's exactly what Jennifer Lynch does.

And there's little else to hold onto in the film. After a couple of evocative shots in the opening, there's little of visual interest. At one or two moment, she seems to realize the creepiness of the endless plains the Midwest holds, but not to worry, that only lasts for a moment before we're back to mediocre camerawork.

If this movie wasn't so disposable, there'd be so much to pick apart about the stupidity of its morality and conception of violence. But it doesn't even rise to some height of risible violence. It doesn't examine (or do) anything.

And to make it worse, somehow some of the actors (presumably under Lynch's direction) do manage to make the ciphers they're given compelling. Julia Ormond & Cheri Oteri are particularly noteworthy, and even Bill Pullman is decent.

I know it's easy to complain that Jennifer Lynch is just doing a sub par version of her dad's work. But this could have been a nasty, brutal piece of pulp exploitation, and she doesn't do that either. Whatever creative instincts she has, wherever she picked them up, she can't make them her own.
Grade: C-

"No more blue tomorrows. You on high now, love," or, Inland Empire broke my mind

Inland Empire (d. David Lynch, 2006)

Starring: Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons and Justin Theroux

There's something weird about watching this on the same day I watched Uwe Boll's Bloodrayne. That weirdness is increased by the fact that both movies end with the respective heroines flashing back through earlier sequences in the movie. In Bloodrayne's case, it seems like mere padding. But who knows, maybe Boll has a budding auteur inside him, struggling to get out?

But Inland Empire is a dense, insular and obtuse film even for David Lynch. It starts off looking like it's about the way art blurs with reality or replaces reality, as co-stars Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) and Devon Berk (Justin Theroux) begin carrying on a relationship similar to the one they have in their film. And then it might also be about their film's cursed earlier incarnations, which ended in the murder of the two leads. Or it might be three juxtaposed versions of the same story that bleed into each other (including one set in pre-World War II Poland). And then the Polish mob shows up (or are they circus performers?) along with some time-travelling Hollywood Boulevard street-walkers. And unlike Mulholland Drive, which this sometimes seems like a remake of, it doesn't make sense at the end.

Inland Empire's pacing reminds me of the way Family Guy paces jokes. The first hour and a half, the movie seems to hold it's own internal consistency, focusing on Dern and Theroux's characters and the temptation to let art's intensity replace the stupidity and banality of real life.  But then things get very weird once Dern disappears into a set that's become a real building and I started getting lost. I sort of held in this confusing state of mind. And then, somewhere about thirty minutes before the end, the movie started clicking in some sense as callbacks to earlier sequences start proliferating. I still can't explain what the movie was about. Or what the ending meant.

But Laura Dern does an amazing job throughout, playing two different characters, but differentiating them in varied and subtle ways that helped clarify the movie somewhat. In fact, whenever Dern disappears from the film or the camera goes away from her, the film as a whole starts collapsing into a black hole of weirdness. But when she is on screen, it is clear that what's going on is happening to a real person and the strange stuff that people do in David Lynch films is, for her at least, grounded in some real place.

And for his part, Lynch does very well by Dern, treating her like a great cinematic beauty in some scenes (even though she's not a classical beauty in any sense), an intellectual enigma in others, and an adept performer of  slice-of-life realism in even more. I'm not sure if I've seen any other roles that have come close for sheer complexity in the last few years for women, let alone a woman in her 50s. 

But David Lynch makes a transformation into the art-house Lucio Fulci in this film. There are great set-pieces (the street-walkers in Dern's 'living room', Dern's painful death near Hollywood and Vine, all the "inside baseball" movie-making scenes), but the stuff between you have to come to some sort of Stockholm Syndrome-esque acceptance of.

This is far from a glowing review, but it is Lynch at his Lynchiest. It is a fascinating but frustrating glimpse inside a fascinating and frustrating mind. I wouldn't watch this to unwind or with a group of friends. It's a movie fit for a lonely day, when you're sick or mildly hung-over and your mind is in that strange half-accepting but half-stupid mode caused by minor illness or too much drinking.