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#356 - Lost Highway
David Lynch, 1997
While serving a sentence on death row for the murder of his wife, a middle-aged saxophonist is suddenly replaced by a young mechanic.
Lost Highway is a film that I have some rather mixed feelings about (never mind the rating). Looking at Lynch's feature films before and after makes me think that it somehow manages to be a culmination of everything he'd done up until that point and yet still feels like a very rough draft for the sort of truly mind-bending work he'd do with Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. I do take some issue with its especially lurid and pulpy subject matter, which no doubt as something to do with the fact that the film was co-written by Wild at Heart scribe Barry Gifford, which I incidentally cite as my least favourite Lynch feature (as of writing, the only one I haven't seen is Dune, so time will tell if that supposed fiasco manages to overtake Wild at Heart in that regard).
Lost Highway starts off promisingly by introducing us to a halfway-comprehensible narrative involving saxophonist Fred (Bill Pullman) and his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) receiving a series of increasingly intrusive videotapes of their home, as well as Fred meeting a supernaturally disturbing mystery man (Robert Blake) at a house party. After some dark, ambiguous (and occasionally unsettling) scenes, it's revealed that Fred is guilty of murdering Renee and is put on death row. During his time on death row, freaky stuff happens and Fred is inexplicably replaced by Pete (Balthazar Getty), who then gets released under police surveillance and ends up falling in with local gangster Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia) and his mistress Alice (Patricia Arquette). It is this extended middle section beginning with the introduction of Pete that the movie starts to drag a bit. I do have to wonder if the lacklustre acting on the parts of both Getty and Arquette is a deliberate choice on Lynch's part, as if the film is attempting to put out a parody of noir films with its very clichéd plot. Blandly handsome male lead, doe-eyed femme fatale, homicidal crime kingpin, half-assed attempt at both a big score and a getaway...it's peppered with some very Lynchian moments such as Mr. Eddy giving a foul-mouthed yet safety-conscious beatdown to an errant tailgater or the reappearance of the Mystery Man or the actual "big score" (complete with one of the most gruesomely bizarre death scenes ever made even by Lynch standards), but the whole relationship that develops between Pete and Alice is easily the worst thing about the film. Even taking into account the possibility of dark parody or any interpretations of the film's dream-state nature, it still feels like a chore to watch these two.
That being said, the rest of the film plays out reasonably well. Pullman, Blake, and Loggia make the most of their screen-time; though Loggia may be playing a character that's almost identical to Frank Booth in his mixture of down-to-earth charm and twisted menace, he more than makes it his own in every scene he's in. Blake, meanwhile, becomes one of the most memorable things about the film with his uncannily pale appearance and sinister affability making him a quintessential scene-stealer. There's the usual interplay of sound and vision that makes Lynch films quite the aesthetic treat despite their occasional lack of substance - in almost stereotypical fashion, he once again goes back to the "friendly small town with seedy criminal element" well but is sure to update his younger characters for Generation X. On that note, the musical soundtrack once again includes the usual combination of cool jazz, foreboding strings and straight up drones that we've come to expect from regular collaborator Angelo Badalamenti (as well as chilled-out lounge numbers from Barry Adamson), but the stuff that really makes an impression (for better or worse) is the collection of rock songs curated by none other than Trent Reznor. While some of the numbers serve to date the film horribly (Smashing Pumpkins and Marilyn Manson come to mind, both of which stand out for the wrong reasons), the Rammstein numbers are used to surprisingly good effect with the weird keys, thudding guitars and ominous German vocals (though they are still sort of goofy underneath it all, it serves the film well enough in context). It is worth noting that the rocking songs don't kick in until the Pete section of the film, which underscores both the best and worst parts of that section.
To me, Lost Highway is either David Lynch's best bad film or his worst good film (probably the latter). The first and third acts build up such a great atmosphere that it even keeps the sub-Twin Peaks antics of the second act (what is Pete if not a carbon copy of James Hurley, one of the cult show's most markedly useless characters?) from sinking the film completely, deliberately hokey and somewhat-sensible-in-context narrative be damned. Everything else about it - visuals, audio, performances - is so haphazard in terms of quality that I can't uniformly praise it all, yet it has this indescrible charm to it that elevates it far above the station of the similarly trashy Wild at Heart (though I am due for a re-watch of that, I can't imagine it's one of those films that improves with the passage of time - hell, even Lost Highway wasn't one of those films). I still like it, but I doubt I'll ever truly love it - honestly, given what this film is like, it makes sense that I wouldn't.
David Lynch, 1997
While serving a sentence on death row for the murder of his wife, a middle-aged saxophonist is suddenly replaced by a young mechanic.
Lost Highway is a film that I have some rather mixed feelings about (never mind the rating). Looking at Lynch's feature films before and after makes me think that it somehow manages to be a culmination of everything he'd done up until that point and yet still feels like a very rough draft for the sort of truly mind-bending work he'd do with Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. I do take some issue with its especially lurid and pulpy subject matter, which no doubt as something to do with the fact that the film was co-written by Wild at Heart scribe Barry Gifford, which I incidentally cite as my least favourite Lynch feature (as of writing, the only one I haven't seen is Dune, so time will tell if that supposed fiasco manages to overtake Wild at Heart in that regard).
Lost Highway starts off promisingly by introducing us to a halfway-comprehensible narrative involving saxophonist Fred (Bill Pullman) and his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) receiving a series of increasingly intrusive videotapes of their home, as well as Fred meeting a supernaturally disturbing mystery man (Robert Blake) at a house party. After some dark, ambiguous (and occasionally unsettling) scenes, it's revealed that Fred is guilty of murdering Renee and is put on death row. During his time on death row, freaky stuff happens and Fred is inexplicably replaced by Pete (Balthazar Getty), who then gets released under police surveillance and ends up falling in with local gangster Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia) and his mistress Alice (Patricia Arquette). It is this extended middle section beginning with the introduction of Pete that the movie starts to drag a bit. I do have to wonder if the lacklustre acting on the parts of both Getty and Arquette is a deliberate choice on Lynch's part, as if the film is attempting to put out a parody of noir films with its very clichéd plot. Blandly handsome male lead, doe-eyed femme fatale, homicidal crime kingpin, half-assed attempt at both a big score and a getaway...it's peppered with some very Lynchian moments such as Mr. Eddy giving a foul-mouthed yet safety-conscious beatdown to an errant tailgater or the reappearance of the Mystery Man or the actual "big score" (complete with one of the most gruesomely bizarre death scenes ever made even by Lynch standards), but the whole relationship that develops between Pete and Alice is easily the worst thing about the film. Even taking into account the possibility of dark parody or any interpretations of the film's dream-state nature, it still feels like a chore to watch these two.
That being said, the rest of the film plays out reasonably well. Pullman, Blake, and Loggia make the most of their screen-time; though Loggia may be playing a character that's almost identical to Frank Booth in his mixture of down-to-earth charm and twisted menace, he more than makes it his own in every scene he's in. Blake, meanwhile, becomes one of the most memorable things about the film with his uncannily pale appearance and sinister affability making him a quintessential scene-stealer. There's the usual interplay of sound and vision that makes Lynch films quite the aesthetic treat despite their occasional lack of substance - in almost stereotypical fashion, he once again goes back to the "friendly small town with seedy criminal element" well but is sure to update his younger characters for Generation X. On that note, the musical soundtrack once again includes the usual combination of cool jazz, foreboding strings and straight up drones that we've come to expect from regular collaborator Angelo Badalamenti (as well as chilled-out lounge numbers from Barry Adamson), but the stuff that really makes an impression (for better or worse) is the collection of rock songs curated by none other than Trent Reznor. While some of the numbers serve to date the film horribly (Smashing Pumpkins and Marilyn Manson come to mind, both of which stand out for the wrong reasons), the Rammstein numbers are used to surprisingly good effect with the weird keys, thudding guitars and ominous German vocals (though they are still sort of goofy underneath it all, it serves the film well enough in context). It is worth noting that the rocking songs don't kick in until the Pete section of the film, which underscores both the best and worst parts of that section.
To me, Lost Highway is either David Lynch's best bad film or his worst good film (probably the latter). The first and third acts build up such a great atmosphere that it even keeps the sub-Twin Peaks antics of the second act (what is Pete if not a carbon copy of James Hurley, one of the cult show's most markedly useless characters?) from sinking the film completely, deliberately hokey and somewhat-sensible-in-context narrative be damned. Everything else about it - visuals, audio, performances - is so haphazard in terms of quality that I can't uniformly praise it all, yet it has this indescrible charm to it that elevates it far above the station of the similarly trashy Wild at Heart (though I am due for a re-watch of that, I can't imagine it's one of those films that improves with the passage of time - hell, even Lost Highway wasn't one of those films). I still like it, but I doubt I'll ever truly love it - honestly, given what this film is like, it makes sense that I wouldn't.