Lost Highway (1997) * A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: Potentially interesting story rendered dull and coldly distant by David Lynch's perpetually smug and alienating style. There are better ways to be conned.
Watching LOST HIGHWAY, I kept thinking about a picture puzzle that you spend a week trying to solve, only to discover half the pieces are missing. I felt conned; I'd lost two and a half hours of my life over a movie that added up to exactly nothing. Everything in LOST HIGHWAY cancels itself out.
There are people who have argued this point with me at length, insisting that was what the movie was about. I disagree, because LOST HIGHWAY doesn't even bother to enlist our attention long enough to BE about anything. It is a self-important and boring film that builds in its own excuses for being and never tells us what they are.
The story actually has an intriguing presence. A jazz musician (Bill Pullman) and his wife receive a series of videotapes in the mail. Someone is walking around filming their house. Then the stranger gets bolder and starts filming the *inside* of the house as well. Eventually, the tapes show Pullman having murdered his wife -- and sure enough, guess what's happened.
Pullman is sent to prison, but while awaiting execution, he has a series of bizarre Lynchian experiences in his cell and morphs into someone else (Balthazar Getty), a young punk. Nobody can explain it, but they have to let him go. That doesn't mean they can't keep an eye on him, of course.
As I said, all of this is potentially interesting. Not in Lynch's hands. Everything I described is stretched out to fill the entire first hour of the movie, which slithers by *so* slowly and lingers on every insignificant gesture *so* painfully that by the time we get to the change-over, all interest in the goings-on has been buried. The actors are not bad in their roles -- they're just made into zombies. I was reminded of the way Robert Bresson -- the French director with an almost paranoid loathing of actors attempting to supersede the director's vision -- who made his actors repeat scenes until they simply did them with mechanical precision and no attempt at personification. Except that Bresson had a larger vision to communicate. Lynch has nothing that we can discern, save the urge to be artfully bizarre.
The other day I saw BEGOTTEN, a movie with no dialogue and no real storyline that succeeded excellently in being enthralling. Why did that work and LOST HIGHWAY fail? Probably because BEGOTTEN was purer and not beholden to anything remotely familiar. LOST HIGHWAY is so obviously David Lynch indulging himself to no good end that we're alienated and fed up in short order.
David Lynch has made two, possibly three films that I enjoyed: ERASERHEAD, which was probably the best showcase for his homegrown surreal nightmares; BLUE VELVET, which actually set up a story in the midst of his pretentions, and THE ELEPHANT MAN, which made the most sense and was the most human. Everything since, and no doubt from now on, has proven to be a waste of time, and to be honest I'm not one to mourn.
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