Inland Empire

FLICK When a movie combines film noir with scenes that play with time and space plus bunny people on a theater stage you can only be in David Lynch-land. Taking us down the rabbit hole to an awesome wonderland of stylish visions with plenty of mood and mystery, Lynch, who previously gave us Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet and the cult favorite “Twin Peaks”, sets up Inland Empire with the making of a Hollywood movie that has a screenplay cursed by a Polish Gypsy folk tale. But Lynch’s film is anything but a Hollywood movie and may not appeal to those who are impatient and expect rapid storytelling or demand traditional structure and story arcs.
Lynch is a modern artist who creates film images like a surreal painter uses his canvas. Using a variety of techniques and with the occasional look of a Japanese horror movie but with less gruesome violence, Lynch adds some humor and pop references with songs by Beck, Etta James, and a group of young women dancing to “The Loco-Motion,” though refrains from the obvious choice of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit”.
Laura Dern gives a mesmerizing performance as Nikki, the actress who falls for her leading man, played by the handsome and immensely talented Justin Theroux. Nikki plays Susan in the film-within-the-film whose life begins to blur with her character. With fine showings by Jeremy Irons as the director making “On High in Blue Tomorrows”, and particularly, in a brief role as Nikki’s neighbor who foretells of danger, Grace Zabriskie, it’s Dern who becomes the chameleon ”when logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead.”

But back to the eye-catching humanoid bunnies on stage who behave like very normal boring people, either sitting on a sofa or ironing. When one bunny man makes his entrance, there is a huge applause from the audience, in recognition of his fame and star power. They appear to comment on rather than parallel the plot and eventually interact with Nikki/Susan via telephone, allowing for connections of what is real and what is a made up story to intersect. But if all the world’s a stage, I think I want to stop and get off. Running time: 179 minutes. My Score: 8.5 out of 10.