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Overall Rating
 Awesome: 29.41%
Worth A Look: 14.71%
Average: 7.84%
Pretty Bad: 22.55%
Total Crap: 25.49%
5 reviews, 72 user ratings
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| Lost Highway |
by Rob Gonsalves
"Probably for Lynch fans only; others beware."
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In David Lynch's "Lost Highway," we get to know an L.A. jazz hipster named Fred Madison (Bill Pullman), who suspects his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) of cheating on him. Renee is murdered -- cut into pieces -- and a confused Fred is tried and convicted. In his cell, Fred (who's been having headaches) somehow changes into a young mechanic named Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) -- and we're into a whole other story.Or are we? Pete, who fixes cars for mobster Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia), falls for Mr. Eddy's moll Alice -- played by Patricia Arquette again. There's also a Mystery Man (a ghastly Robert Blake) who can be in two places at once and seems to function as a monitor/puppetmaster, like the lever-pulling Man in the Planet in Lynch's seminal Eraserhead. The movie demands patience and attention, and some viewers may not feel it's a fair trade. In Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, Lynch set up a mystery and then sprinkled surreal oddities onto it. Lost Highway is all oddities, and the mystery is the film itself.
Most Lynch fans, I think, will much prefer the first half, and not only because Balthazar Getty is sullenly inexpressive and annoyingly "cool" -- a rebel without a pulse. The Fred section is doomy and deliberately paced, heavy with voluptuous erotic dread; the languid nothingness sucks you in. The Pete section is noisy and overwrought, with occasional bursts of thrash metal and freakish violence, such as death by coffee table -- which seems meant to be funnier than it is. (It's staged poorly, or maybe it was trimmed to avoid an NC-17 rating.)
Yet even the weak second half offers distinctively Lynchian pleasures. When Alice is forced to strip at gunpoint, our response is divided between moral disgust and detached appreciation of Lynch's pristine composition of the shot (the cinematography, by Peter Deming, is superb throughout). When Mr. Eddy assaults a tailgater, it's the movie's comic high point, but we also feel sorry for the poor pistol-whipped victim. Lynch was a wizard at this comic-horror stuff years before Quentin Tarantino cut off that cop's Blue Velvet ear in Reservoir Dogs.
Lost Highway is a movie about divisions, so it's fitting that we come away from it with mixed feelings. Some may prefer the faster, more lurid Pete section and find Fred's half boring. Lynch himself seems split between artist and entertainer. In the climax, a chaotic seizure in which the literal and the symbolic collide, Lynch is a capital-A Artist who can't, or won't, bring the movie together in any satisfying way. He expects us to do it. Lynch is courting audience hostility here in a way he hasn't since Eraserhead, which at least was wacko from the start. Lost Highway begins conventionally and then takes a hard left. The defiant strangeness reminded me of Alex Cox's career-ending doodles Straight to Hell and Walker (both of which I liked).
I enjoyed much of Lost Highway, though I hesitate to recommend it to the uninitiated. It's classic Lynch -- a metaphysical horror movie about the dark mysteries of sex. I was enthralled even when I was baffled. Yet many Lynch fans may find it depressing."Lost Highway" is mesmerizing yet cold and remote -- an exotic fish we can't touch. Instead of connecting with us, David Lynch now wants to withdraw into his brilliant void, and he doesn't care whether we go with him.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=285&reviewer=416
originally posted: 12/28/06 11:11:04
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USA
21-Feb-1997 (R)
DVD: 25-Mar-2007
UK
N/A
Australia
N/A
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