- Writer, director:
- David Lynch.
- Cast:
- Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, Justin Theroux.
This is a story that happened yesterday. But I know it’s tomorrow.
Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) relaxes at home.
Shot on the cheap on digital video, Inland Empire was filmed without a complete script, and Lynch instead mostly made it up as they went along. Amazingly, this somehow works — fragmented, but still with a general, thematic cohesion. It stars Laura Dern as Nikki Grace, an actress who has just gotten the role of her life. The film they’re shooting, On High In Blue Tomorrows, starts bleeding into reality, and the nature of reality and fiction become even more confused when it turns out the On High is a remake of an old Polish play, 47, rumoured to be cursed.
The look of the film has received some criticism, but I like the hand-held look; it’s got a cinéma vérité feeling that helps ground the surreal wackiness of the plot. And what a wacky, surreal plot it is.
Laura Dern proves that sometimes not even singing hookers will cure the blues.
The world of Inland Empire is one of the hyper-real (even more so than the “real” world) where fact and fiction bleed into each other to the point that it’s impossible to tell which is which. Where things in stories can become real, and where real life becomes fiction. It’s pure film-making — logic be damned. Ignoring any urge for conventionality, Lynch simply follows his whims wherever they take him: there are people with rabbit heads, fiction bleeding into reality, reality bleeding into fiction, time folding in on itself, musical numbers featuring hookers — in short: one of the best film ever made. Really. And Laura Dern does an outstanding job; she finds an essential truth in her character no matter what Lynch throws at her.
