Plot
David Lynch wrote and directed this look at two women who find themselves walking a fine line between truth and deception in the beautiful but dangerous netherworld of Hollywood. A beautiful woman (Laura Elena Harring) riding in a limousine along Los Angeles' Mulholland Drive is targeted by a would-be shooter, but before he can pull the trigger, she is injured when her limo is hit by another car. The woman stumbles from the wreck with a head wound, and in time makes her way into an apartment with no idea of where or who she is. As it turns out, the apartment is home to an elderly woman who is out of town, and is allowing her niece Betty (Naomi Watts) to stay there; Betty is a small-town girl from Canada who wants to be an actress, and her aunt was able to arrange an audition with a film director for her. Betty befriends the injured woman, who begins calling herself "Rita" after seeing a poster of Rita Hayworth. While Betty's audition impresses a casting agent, and she catches the eye of hotshot director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), Kesher's producers and moneymen insist with no small vehemence that he instead cast a woman named Camilla Rhodes. As Rita attempts to put the pieces of her life back together, she pulls the name Diane Selwyn from her memory; Rita thinks it could be her real name, but when she and Betty find a listing for Diane Selwyn and visit her apartment, they discover the latest victim of a mysterious killer who is eluding police detective Harry McKnight (Robert Forster). Rita's emotional identity soon takes a left turn, and it turns out that neither woman is quite who she once appeared to be. David Lynch originally conceived Mulholland Drive as the pilot film for a television series; after the ABC television network rejected the pilot and declined to air it, the French production film StudioCanal took over the project, and Lynch reshot and re-edited the material into a theatrical feature. The resulting version of Mulholland Drive premiered at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, where David Lynch shared Best Director honors with Joel Coen. ~ Mark Deming, RoviReview
Early on in Mulholland Drive, a man sits in a Hollywood greasy spoon, relating a dream to a friend sitting across from him. The dream, he explains, took place in the same diner, only in the dream some unspeakably evil presence lived behind it. He's come here now to prove to himself that the dream wasn't real. After paying the check, he and his companion venture outside and walk around to the back of the building. Sure enough, an almost ludicrously hideous face appears from behind a cinder black wall, and the man faints dead away. The scene is pure David Lynch: Simultaneously silly and terrifying, it provides a clue of sorts to the film as a whole. Mulholland Drive operates according to the relentless logic of dreams -- the only kind of logic that matters to Lynch. Like some kind of reverse Occam's razor, the most outlandish explanation for any given situation is inevitably right. The film is full of repeated motifs (the diner is one) and shifting identities, all pivoting on Lynch's familiar obsessions -- sexy innocents ripe for corruption, mysterious strangers speaking in riddles, and sugary pop songs made over as haunting arias, to name a few -- but the connections only become apparent in the film's final third. Lynch plays it relatively straight in the beginning. When wholesome, fresh-faced Betty (Naomi Watts) and beautiful, amnesia-stricken Rita (Laura Elena Harring) embark on their plan to discover Rita's true identity, one almost believes that the answer will lie with the shadowy criminal syndicate that seems to be behind Rita's attempted murder, the near ruination of movie director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), and the activities of a hilariously inept hit man who has to keep shooting the witnesses to his bungled handiwork. But after the two women discover Diane Selwyn's corpse, the film's dream logic takes over, and suddenly no one is who they appear to be -- least of all Betty. Newcomer Watts' bold performance makes her eventual transformation (which is set in motion by a genuinely steamy love scene -- a rare thing in recent American movies) all the more stunning. Lynch seems to have benefited from developing the project for television, which isn't very forgiving of unstructured weirdness, and from finishing it thanks to French producers who were willing to indulge his more arcane tastes. Unlike Lost Highway, which felt like an incoherent mishmash of self-consciously spooky incidents, Mulholland Drive's madness has some method to it. ~ Tom Vick, RoviCast
- Justin Theroux - Adam Kesher
- Naomi Watts - Betty Elms
- Laura Elena Harring - Rita
- Ann Miller - Coco Lenoix
- Dan Hedaya - Vincenzo Castigliane
Credit
Peter Jamison - Art Director, Johanna Ray - Casting, Amy Stofsky - Costume Designer, Scott Cameron - First Assistant Director, Mark Cotone - First Assistant Director, David Lynch - Director, Mary Sweeney - Editor, Pierre Edelman - Executive Producer, Angelo Badalamenti - Composer (Music Score), Jack Fisk - Production Designer, Peter Deming - Cinematographer, Alain Sarde - Producer, Michael Polaire - Producer, Mary Sweeney - Producer, Tony Krantz - Producer, Neal Edelstein - Producer, David Lynch - Sound/Sound Designer, Ed Novick - Sound/Sound Designer, David Lynch - Screenwriter, Ron Eng - Supervising Sound Editor, Christine Kim - Assistant Editor| Mulher Policia (2002 Film), Mulgogi Jari (2001 Film) | |
| Mulholland Falls (1996 Film), Mulla (2008 Film) |
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