Mulholland Drive

MOVIE DESCRIPTION:

David Lynch wrote and directed this look at two women who find themselves walking a fine line between truth and deception in the beautiful but dangerous netherworld of Hollywood. A beautiful woman (Laura Elena Harring) riding in a limousine along Los Angeles' Mulholland Drive is targeted by a would-be shooter, but before he can pull the trigger, she is injured when her limo is hit by another car. The woman stumbles from the wreck with a head wound, and in time makes her way into an apartment with no idea of where or who she is. As it turns out, the apartment is home to an elderly woman who is out of town, and is allowing her niece Betty (Naomi Watts) to stay there; Betty is a small-town girl from Canada who wants to be an actress, and her aunt was able to arrange an audition with a film director for her. Betty befriends the injured woman, who begins calling herself "Rita" after seeing a poster of Rita Hayworth. While Betty's audition impresses a casting agent, and she catches the eye of hotshot director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), Kesher's producers and moneymen insist with no small vehemence that he instead cast a woman named Camilla Rhodes. As Rita attempts to put the pieces of her life back together, she pulls the name Diane Selwyn from her memory; Rita thinks it could be her real name, but when she and Betty find a listing for Diane Selwyn and visit her apartment, they discover the latest victim of a mysterious killer who is eluding police detective Harry McKnight (Robert Forster). Rita's emotional identity soon takes a left turn, and it turns out that neither woman is quite who she once appeared to be. David Lynch originally conceived Mulholland Drive as the pilot film for a television series; after the ABC television network rejected the pilot and declined to air it, the French production film StudioCanal took over the project, and Lynch reshot and re-edited the material into a theatrical feature. The resulting version of Mulholland Drive premiered at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, where David Lynch shared Best Director honors with Joel Coen. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

DVD FEATURES:

• Region: 1
• Number of Discs: 1
• Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 (Theatre Wide Screen)
• Audio: 5.1, DTS
• Screen: Enhanced Wide Screen Letterbox for 16x9 TV
• Subtitle: French, Spanish, English

AWARDS

• Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

•     Nominated Best Director - 2001 (David Lynch)

• American Film Institute

•     Nominated Best Actress - 2001 (Naomi Watts)
•     Nominated Best Composer - 2001 (Angelo Badalamenti)
•     Nominated Best Director - 2001 (David Lynch)
•     Nominated Best Picture - 2001 (Alain Sarde, Mary Sweeney, Neal Edelstein, Michael Polaire, Tony Krantz)

• British Academy of Film and Television Arts

•     Won Best Editing - 2001 (Mary Sweeney)
•     Nominated Best Film Music - 2001 (Angelo Badalamenti)

• Broadcast Film Critics Association

•     Nominated Best Picture - 2001

• Cannes Film Festival

•     Won Best Director - 2001 (David Lynch)

• Chicago Film Critics Association

•     Won Best Actress - 2001 (Naomi Watts)
•     Won Best Director - 2001 (David Lynch)
•     Won Best Picture - 2001

• French Academy of Cinema

•     Won Best Foreign Film - 2001

• Hollywood Foreign Press Association

•     Nominated Best Director - 2001 (David Lynch)
•     Nominated Best Original Score - 2001 (Angelo Badalamenti)
•     Nominated Best Picture - Drama - 2001
•     Nominated Best Screenplay - 2001 (David Lynch)

• Independent Spirit Awards

•     Won Best Cinematography - 2001 (Peter Deming)

• Los Angeles Film Critics Association

•     Won Best Actress - Runner-up - 2001 (Naomi Watts)
•     Won Best Director - 2001 (David Lynch)
•     Won Best Picture (Runner-up) - 2001

• National Board of Review

•     Won Breakthrough Performance of the Year - 2001 (Naomi Watts)
•     Nominated Best Picture - 2001

• National Society of Film Critics

•     Won Best Actress - 2001 (Naomi Watts)
•     Won Best Picture - 2001

• New York Film Critics Circle

•     Won Best Picture - 2001

• Telluride Film Festival

•     Film Presented - 2001

• Toronto Film Critics Association

•     Won Best Director - 2001 (David Lynch)
•     Won Best Picture [Runner-up] - 2001

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• Director:

  David Lynch

• Producer:

  Alain Sarde, Michael Polaire, Mary Sweeney, Tony Krantz, Neal Edelstein

• Screenwriter:

  David Lynch

• Cinematographer:

  Peter Deming

• Composer (Music Score):

  Angelo Badalamenti

• Editor:

  Mary Sweeney

• Production Designer:

  Jack Fisk

• Art Director:

  Peter Jamison

• Executive Producer:

  Pierre Edelman

• Costume Designer:

  Amy Stofsky

• Sound/Sound Designer:

  David Lynch, Ed Novick

• First Assistant Director:

  Scott Cameron, Mark Cotone

• Casting:

  Johanna Ray

• Supervising Sound Editor:

  Ron Eng

• Assistant Editor:

  Christine Kim

REVIEW:

• Early on in Mulholland Drive, a man sits in a Hollywood greasy spoon, relating a dream to a friend sitting across from him. The dream, he explains, took place in the same diner, only in the dream some unspeakably evil presence lived behind it. He's come here now to prove to himself that the dream wasn't real. After paying the check, he and his companion venture outside and walk around to the back of the building. Sure enough, an almost ludicrously hideous face appears from behind a cinder black wall, and the man faints dead away. The scene is pure David Lynch: Simultaneously silly and terrifying, it provides a clue of sorts to the film as a whole. Mulholland Drive operates according to the relentless logic of dreams -- the only kind of logic that matters to Lynch. Like some kind of reverse Occam's razor, the most outlandish explanation for any given situation is inevitably right. The film is full of repeated motifs (the diner is one) and shifting identities, all pivoting on Lynch's familiar obsessions -- sexy innocents ripe for corruption, mysterious strangers speaking in riddles, and sugary pop songs made over as haunting arias, to name a few -- but the connections only become apparent in the film's final third. Lynch plays it relatively straight in the beginning. When wholesome, fresh-faced Betty (Naomi Watts) and beautiful, amnesia-stricken Rita (Laura Elena Harring) embark on their plan to discover Rita's true identity, one almost believes that the answer will lie with the shadowy criminal syndicate that seems to be behind Rita's attempted murder, the near ruination of movie director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), and the activities of a hilariously inept hit man who has to keep shooting the witnesses to his bungled handiwork. But after the two women discover Diane Selwyn's corpse, the film's dream logic takes over, and suddenly no one is who they appear to be -- least of all Betty. Newcomer Watts' bold performance makes her eventual transformation (which is set in motion by a genuinely steamy love scene -- a rare thing in recent American movies) all the more stunning. Lynch seems to have benefited from developing the project for television, which isn't very forgiving of unstructured weirdness, and from finishing it thanks to French producers who were willing to indulge his more arcane tastes. Unlike Lost Highway, which felt like an incoherent mishmash of self-consciously spooky incidents, Mulholland Drive's madness has some method to it. ~ Tom Vick, Rovi