LOST HIGHWAY
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1997 Scott Renshaw
(October) Starring: Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty, Robert Blake, Robert Loggia. Screenplay: David Lynch and Barry Gifford. Producers: Deepak Nayar, Tom Sternberg, Mary Sweeney. Director: David Lynch. MPAA Rating: R (sexual situations, nudity, violence, profanity) Running Time: 134 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Please don't bother asking me what LOST HIGHWAY is "about," because I have only the vaguest idea. I'm also not particularly bothered by that fact, any more than I am bothered by not knowing what a Bosch painting or a given chapter in "Ulysses" is "about." A linear narrative is not a pre-requisite for the evocation of an emotional response, and David Lynch is one of the few artists who has tried to push the limits of cinema as a medium of sound, images and possibilities. That doesn't mean he always knows when to stop pushing. Somewhere between the fever dream of ERASERHEAD and the ominous suburban dread of BLUE VELVET and the pilot of "Twin Peaks" is a place where Lynch gets in trouble, where he begins to irritate the audience he is trying to seduce. LOST HIGHWAY is Lynch at his best and his worst, as unnerving as it is excessive.
Any attempt to describe the plot of LOST HIGHWAY is ultimately an exercise in futility, but essentially it involves two uniquely connected story-lines. In the first, nightclub musician Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) faces a couple of potentially threatening situations. The jealous Fred is worried that his wife Renee (a brunette Patricia Arquette) is cheating on him, but even more worried when someone begins leaving videotapes on his doorstep showing someone slowly stalking them. Then, suddenly, Renee is dead, and Fred is in prison on death row after being convicted of her murder. Then, even more suddenly, Fred has been replaced in his prison cell by Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty), a young mechanic with no memory of how he got there. When Pete is released, he ends up mixed up with a gangster named Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia), Mr. Eddy's mistress Alice (Patricia Arquette again, now a blonde) and a spooky mystery man (Robert Blake).
There is little doubt in my mind that, when he is working at the top of his form, David Lynch can turn our darkest unspoken fears into brilliant cinema like no other living director. There are nightmare visions in Lynch projects which can leave you shaking for days, and there are moments during the first hour of LOST HIGHWAY which build and release tension with an almost unbearable skill. Long stretches of silence are punctuated by sudden bursts of sound; characters drift into darkness in shots that linger long enough to make you start peeking through your fingers. And then there is the hilariously creepy scene where Blake's white-faced Mystery Man taunts Fred by making a phone call to Fred's house...which the Mystery Man himself then answers. With its eerie production design and slowly mounting paranoia, LOST HIGHWAY begins to cast a spell which will have viewers anxious but intrigued.
Too bad it takes such a short time to lose those viewers entirely. The Fred-to-Pete transformation is not a fatal error in and of itself, though audiences used to conventional narratives may be baffled by it. The real villain in the collapse of LOST HIGHWAY is Lynch's inability to ground the film so that its world makes internal sense. ERASERHEAD's landscape was unquestionably surreal; BLUE VELVET, as unsettling as it was, always focused on the horrors of the real world. Lynch's misfires, like WILD AT HEART and the latter stages of "Twin Peaks," teased viewers with real world horrors before launching into surreal realms which left them throwing up their hands (if not actually throwing up). The mistake in LOST HIGHWAY isn't the outrageous character shift, but the way the other characters in the film respond to that event as a problem to be solved. If LOST HIGHWAY is about psychosis made flesh, about psychological duality becoming physical duality, it falls short of pulling you into that world because it has given you the impression that there is an "answer." And while you're busy giving yourself a headache trying to solve that mystery, you aren't getting caught up in the atmosphere of the mystery itself.
LOST HIGHWAY contains too many individual moments of vintage Lynch to be considered a failure. However, Lynch does seem to be repeating himself as he tries to create those moments. The grimly comic violence, the degraded sexuality and the languid exchanges of dialogue are all familiar, and seem more like self-plagiarism than a characteristic style. Loggia's gangster with the hair-trigger temper is a pale imitation of Dennis Hopper's savage menace in BLUE VELVET, and Lynch's madonna/whore fixation is in full bloom both in Arquette's sly dual role and Pete's girlfriend Sheila (Natasha Gregson Wagner). Lynch often seems more interested in re-creating than creating, in taking the perfect 10's of his career and cranking them up to 11. For its first hour, LOST HIGHWAY is brilliant, and there are flashes of that brilliance for another 75 minutes, but they don't hold together because there isn't a consistent tone or structure to sustain them. In a film where everything seems to be in two places at once, it is fitting that LOST HIGHWAY doesn't stay in any one place long enough.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 highway robberies: 6.
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