Inland Empire

Just finished David Lynch's Inland Empire and here are some initial impressions: the film begins by settling us into a darkly surreal landscape, reacquainting us with Grace Zabriskie who plays Laura Dern's portentous neighbour. She sets up the film's phantasmagorical relationship with linearity before fading into the background. Zabriskie is one of several characters whom I would have liked to have seen provided with a bigger role. In fact, my principle critique is the quality that I usually love so dearly within Lynch's texts: its weirdness. Rather than taking the time to firmly develop a number of characters throughout, Lynch introduces several characters, has them utter mysterious one-liners, and then trail off into the dreamscape. The mysterious nature of the film's compelling, kind of like an ontological detective story; but it would have been more so if we didn't lose Justin Theroux, Harry Dean Stanton, Jeremy Irons and Grace Zabriskie half way through (Irons and Stanton return briefly near the end). Instead, Laura Dern liaises with a number of identities before disappearing and reappearing in a variety of different puzzling contexts, the realities of which are difficult to penetrate to say the least (do her multiple identities reflect an artistic actors torment, the feeling they acquire from trying to BE so many different people correctly, in the context of their various stories?), and the rest of the cast is forgotten. What made Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and Mulholland Drive so mesmerizing were the different characters caught up in the enigma, the different opaque perspectives within. Inland Empire suffers by not providing more of its principle characters with a chance to flesh out their identities, while, fittingly enough, the lead character experiences a severe crisis regarding her in/abilities to do so.