This Week in Cinema (01.30.07)

Inland Empire and Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock?

By Beth Capper
Published: January 30th, 2007 | 3:38pm

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INLAND EMPIRE

David Lynch is still in the process of personally distributing his latest surrealist cinematic work, Inland Empire, throughout the U.S., making public appearances recently in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Austin.

The film, which spans three hours, is receiving mixed reviews, with some audience members proclaiming that Lynch has “done it again,” while others flock out of the theaters in droves halfway in. Lynch, in person, was what you might expect, providing curt, enigmatic answers to questions posed by fans in the post-film Q&A that offered very little in the way of exposition of the film’s overall meaning. The only time he seemed to get really animated was when someone asked a rather long-winded question about transcendental meditation — a topic that, these days, Lynch seems far more interested in discussing than the films he is famous for.

Inland Empire is long — perhaps even a little too long — but regardless of what you may have heard, it isn’t entirely without sense. Lynch employs his characteristic non-linear trajectory in order to explore a number of different narratives that revolve around the multiple characters played by actress Laura Dern, who delivers a stunning and harrowing performance in each.

The first, most discernable, and arguably the most central, of these narratives sees Dern playing an actress named Nikki Grace. Grace, alongside her co-star Devon Berk (Justin Theroux) is preparing to act in a new motion picture by the director Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons) called On High in Blue Tomorrows. She’s cast as a character named Susan Blue, but as shooting progresses, Grace is unable to separate her own experiences from the role she is playing and the boundaries between fiction and reality gradually begin to efface.

In this sense, Inland Empire is picking up where Mullholland Drive left off, even featuring a guest appearance from Laura Harring, who plays the lead in the 2001 film. The theme, in this regard, is Hollywood, a place where it is often impossible to tell truth from fiction and where most people’s lives exist just as much in the entertainment industry as they do in reality. Sometimes their respective roles even trump their own lives when it comes to everyday realities, explicated in Inland Empire through a group of pretty girls who sing and dance, and at one point, “Do the Locomotion.” Later, we find out that these girls, along with Dern’s own character (whichever one she is meant to be by this point) are prostitutes on Hollywood Boulevard, their grisly realities bearing no resemblance to the seemingly light-hearted world of prostitution explored in films like Garry Marshall’s Pretty Woman.

The film opens with Dern (as Nikki Grace) in an opulent mansion celebrating her casting success with her L.A. friends. Then, as she becomes more and more entwined with her character she is seen in a dirty back room reciting a long monologue filled with expletives and nasty tales of her unfortunate and desperate sexual encounters. This monologist is married to a Polish man who runs off to join a Baltic circus. To complicate matters, On High in Blue Tomorrows also turns out to be a remake of an uncompleted film titled 4/7 based on a Polish gypsy folktale. It is rumored that the script is cursed and that the film never finished shooting because both of the lead actors were murdered — a fact which seems to disturb Grace immensely, and which may lead to her inability to distinguish fiction from reality. It seems that one of the other narratives running through Inland Empire might be a dramatization of this folk tale, with stunning crisp scenes of snow covered Poland interlocking with the grimy underworld depicted in Hollywood.

There’s also a Polish prostitute sitting in front of a TV screen crying while she watches a sitcom depicting people wearing rabbit costumes going about menial everyday tasks, while a laugh track, coming on spuriously at lines that contain no hint of comedy, makes for sinister viewing. This prostitute is depicted at the beginning of the film being violently abused by a man who is paying her for sex. Then, there’s another woman, played by Julia Ormond, who Dern, in her various incarnations, appears to be running from. This woman claims to have been hypnotized by a Polish circus entertainer to kill Susan Blue/Nikki Grace with a screwdriver.

Inland Empire sees Lynch making the transition from celluloid (or “film”) to digital, making the quality at first seem almost cheap and amateurish. However, as the film progresses, this medium comes into its own with the aid of Lynch’s expertise direction. At its most basic level, Inland Empire is a more complex example of that particular vein of post-modern filmmaking where fictional characters cross over into the real world of the film, or where what is being cinematized is, in fact, reality. Other, less nightmarish, examples of this technique include Spike Jonze’s Adaptation and Robert Altman’s The Player.

However, in the intermittent scenes that combine with Lynch’s master narrative are plotlines that remain enigmatic even as the outlandish credits roll.

WHO THE #$&% IS JACKSON POLLOCK?

When truck driver Teri Horton goes thrift shopping, she always tries to get the best deal. So when a thrift-store clerk tried to charge her $8 for a painting made up entirely of splattered paint and bold, dramatic brush strokes, she managed to barter the lady down to five — a price she still felt was a little pricey for a picture she intended to throw darts at.

On closer inspection, however, it seems like Horton might have bagged herself a real bargain. Could this picture she found in a thrift store really be a Jackson Pollock original?

Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock?— a cinematic debut for director Harry Moses — is a smart documentary that begins by unpacking Horton’s story in front of the camera, as she takes her painting to a variety of art world “experts” to get their opinions as to the validity of her painting. As the film progresses, however, what emerges is a film quietly questioning the validity of these experts’ opinions, and in turn, the criterion for judging what is and what is not to be considered a work of art. Horton does not only receive the same unequivocal, unanimous and final answer from all of the experts she contacts — that her painting is an absolute fake — but she also receives the same icy, condescending treatment. At times, it’s as if the real issue for these experts isn’t whether or not the painting is really a Pollock, but rather, the idea that a Pollock could fall into the hands of a working class trucker like Horton.

Being uneducated as to the unique elements and intricacies of a Pollock painting does not deter Horton, however, and she refuses to admit defeat. Her next step is to employ a leading forensics expert, who has worked with various galleries all over the world as an outside contractor, to help her find any clues that might in some way connect her painting to Pollock. It takes a while but eventually he comes up with something — discovering a match between a fingerprint on one of Pollock’s paint cans now preserved in his East Hampton studio and one on the back of Horton’s painting. Still, the art world elites balk at the evidence — the most obnoxious participant being Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, whose snobbery climbs to new and unexplored heights in his on-camera interviews with Moses.

By the end of Jackson Pollock, you are left rooting for Horton, not just because you believe her painting is the genuine article, but also to see elitists like Hoving finally eat their words.