Inland Empire

David Lynch’s newest film, Inland Empire, concludes its weeklong run at Cinema 21 this Thursday. The three-hour-long epic may stand as his most cerebrally challenging work to date, as viewers scramble to make sense of the panoply of hallucinations, movies within movies, and hallucinations within movies that make up this latest opus.

While his style will be expected and familiar to many persons with Lynch experience, don’t expect the kind of narrative craft found in Blue Velvet or Wild At Heart. In fact, you might as well not waste any time looking for a narrative at all, since it will take at least three viewings to start to piece it together.

Essentially, the film follows Laura Dern as an actress working on a film with a cursed script, and goes from there into hours of tangential meanderings. The skill and care that went into the film’s making are obvious, but I could not help coming away with a sense that there was something missing.

There are, however, many points at which the film succeeds. As the main character(s), Dern displays a fantastical variety of grimaces when faced with the Polish gangsters, Baltic circus performers, prostitutes, bums and Gypsy cursemasters that populate the film. As is often found in Lynch’s more surreal works, there is an all-pervasive sense of claustrophobic dread that oozes into even the most brightly lit scenes, not to mention the at least 30 minutes of the film that is solely devoted to close-ups of creepy ’60s-style lamps and poorly lit hallways. This feeling climaxes with a Gypsy cursemaster toward what seems to be, chronologically at least, the end of the movie. I don’t want to give it away, but it’s the most gratifying closure that you’re getting out of Inland Empire. Visually, the film has a lot to offer, and there is no denying that Lynch’s mastery of the medium is demonstrated. His die-hard fans will eat this up.

I, on the other hand, felt like I had been handed a present expertly wrapped in fancy wrapping paper, only to find that it contained socks or some shitty sweater that I didn’t want. Inland Empire looks a lot better before you open it. The whole film seems kind of gratuitous-gratuitously weird, gratuitously complicated and just a little overwrought. Sure, there were scenes that were engrossing and artistic, but there were just as many that were kind of silly and smacked of self-indulgence-confusion for confusion’s sake. The characters, for all their artsy complexity, were shallow and almost impossible to relate to, with some dialogue so cryptic and nonsensical it may as well have not even happened. In the end, though, I can’t pan or embrace Inland Empire. It wasn’t horrible, but then again it wasn’t good either. It essentially forced me to sit on the fence-the last thing good art should make you do.