It’s easy to ridicule his impossible earnestness, like an agitated child overcome with conviction, but few actors could commit to this role as completely. Nicholas Cage has a habit of appearing in such films and this is one of his ‘peak’ performances. The trouble is that none of them resonates especially well, and thus we end up with neither compelling intrigue nor drama.Īnd yet there is an awful appeal to the picture, extruded and perversely insistent. The fundamental plot is rather salacious and could have been developed as a mystery or thriller, but Lynch focuses much more on the characters and their quirks. Along the way they are dogged by increasingly outré hitmen (including a repulsively perfect Willem Dafoe) but still find time for plenty of high-kick dancing and motel room sex. (‘ Lost Highway’ another.) Based on a novel by Barry Gifford, the film follows an Elvis-loving outlaw, Sailor Ripley (Nicholas Cage), and his young girlfriend Lula Fortune (a young and willowy Laura Dern) on a parole-breaking trek through the South. Sometimes an entire film will become superfluous, recognizably kin to Lynch’s other films but nothing more than a burst of sound and fury. Superfluity itself becomes an essential component of his milieu, as in ‘Twin Peaks’, ‘ Blue Velvet’, or ‘ Mulholland Drive’.īut this approach doesn’t always work. He may not always (ever?) explain himself to the audience, but at his best we get the sense that each bizarre idiosyncrasy or hokey tangent has some essential purpose. The kind of director who will ‘build’ dust bunnies and install them himself beneath a radiator on-set even though the camera never looks below knee-level. DAVID LYNCH is a director of meticulous consideration and invention.
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