Film review by Kevin Patterson
Lost Highway * * * 1/2 (out of four) R, 1997 Directed by David Lynch. Written by Lynch and Barry Gifford. Starring Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty.
When I left the theater after seeing David Lynch's "Lost Highway," I remarked to a fellow movie-goer, "I feel like someone just sucked my brains out through my nose and put them back in through my ears." In his first feature film in five years, Lynch delivers a film second only to his debut picture "Eraserhead" on the weirdness scale. You won't "know" what happened when it's over, though there are certainly enough clues with which to make some reasonable guesses.
It is difficult to describe the plot of this film, because it depends partly on how you interpret it. I can, however, describe what we see on the screen: L.A. jazz saxophonist Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) and his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette), whom he clearly suspects of infidelity, receive a series of videotapes apparently filmed inside their house while they were asleep. They are, naturally enough, more than a little frightened and confused, and it doesn't help matters any when "Mystery Man" (Robert Blake) approaches Fred at a party and proceeds to call himself on the telephone at the Madisons' house in a scene that is at once hilarious and unnerving. The next morning, Fred finds another videotape which, to his (and our) surprise, shows him brutally murdering Renee in their bedroom. He is convicted of her murder and sent to death row, where he inexplicably disappears one night and is replaced by a young mechanic named Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty). The perplexed prison officials release Dayton, whose life begins to intersect with Fred in a number of ways - most notably his affair with Alice Wakefield (Arquette again), a blonde who is otherwise Renee's spitting image, and another encounter with the Mystery Man. I would be giving away a little too much to reveal any more, but suffice it to say that Lynch doesn't offer any neat wrap–ups, nor does he put a lid on the metaphysical confusion: the cinematic demons of "Lost Highway" are out in full force from beginning to end.
This description might make "Lost Highway" sound like a giddy exercise in haywire surrealism, but in fact, while there are traces of Lynch's weird sense of humor, this film is anything but giddy most of the time. On the contrary, Lost Highway is a dark and perplexing mystery that takes Lynch's previous excursions into murder and intrigue one step farther. The film does not revolve around a character investigating a mystery; rather, the character *is* the mystery. There are recurring and at times deeply disturbing images of suspicion, distrust, and infidelity thoughout the film that seem to indicate a deluded, fractured psyche at the root of all the bizarre goings-on here. We, the audience, are left to puzzle out whose psyche it is that is driving this (probably Fred's, in my opinion) and what, in that case, the other characters and events are meant to represent.
All of this proceeds, appropriately, in Lynch's typically slow-paced, idiosyncratic style. As is often the case, Lynch relies on sound, imagery, and mood more than on dialogue and action to tell his story, and in "Lost Highway" it works perfectly. There are scenes when the camera lingers on Fred's blank expression as he drifts uncomfortably down a hallway, or on his pained face in his prison cell while the haunting strains of This Mortal Coil's "Song to the Siren" can be heard faintly in the background; nothing is technically "happening" in these scenes, yet they present a vivid picture of a man losing his grip just as effective as, if not more so than, the hysterical screaming found in most movie presentations of insanity. Lynch's direction and Director of Photography Pete Deming's darkly lit cinematography serve to create a nearly suffocating atmosphere of tension and fear that are exactly what is needed for this story.
Well, most of the time, anyway - I have to admit that I was a bit bored at times during the section of the film with Pete Dayton as the protgaonist, which is less inherently interesting and mostly keeps the viewer's attention because of its tie-ins to the original mystery. The main characters in this "reality" - Dayton (a well-meaning but none too intelligent 24-year-old), a sleazy gangster (who for some reason has two names but otherwise is pretty much a stock character), and his porn-star girlfriend (the blond Arquette) - are nothing you couldn't find in any of the two dozen "Pulp Fiction" wannabes; fortunately, the reappearance of the Mystery Man as well as some other typically Lynchian elements, such as the strained, awkward conversations between Pete and his parents, help to preserve the film's spooky, unnerving tone during this stretch. Lynch's typically graphic and disturbing portrayals of fringe sexuality, while relevant to the themes of jealousy and adultery, are also somewhat overdone here. It's not exactly exploitative - like almost everything else in this film, the sex is thoroughly weird and creepy and is unlikely to provide any cheap lurid thrills - as much as it is unnecessary and frankly kind of dumb by the seventh or eighth time Arquette takes her clothes off.
That said, these minor flaws don't prevent "Lost Highway" from attaining its place as one of the darkest, most unsettling films to hit the screens in recent years. It is a one-way ride down the lost highway of a disturbed mind, and as such it is gripping, intense, and brilliantly effective.
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